Madeleine Wattenberg’s debut collection, I/O, is a finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and will be published in March 2021.
On the cover: Untitled 2018, by Moyna Flannigan.
“When I first viewed Moyna Flannigan’s painting,” Wattenberg said, “I was immediately reminded of a poem in my collection that describes Medusa floating through space as part of an imagined physics experiment. After reading more about Flannigan’s work, it makes sense that her painting speaks so strongly to me; Flannigan is not only interested in feminism, myth, and physics, central themes throughout my collection, but also in layering time through her medium. In a segment for Quarantine Podcast Sessions, she states about recent collage work that she ‘want[s] to play with time and space so that a different time frame can exist within the same image.’ I feel this impulse very strongly in my own work, such as in a long poem in which letters are written from a contemporary speaker, a scientist’s daughter, to the mythical figure Io. It’s an added delight that Flannigan drew inspiration for this painting from two poems by Michael Longley, each of which describes horses in Homeric literature. Coincidentally, I/O also contains a poem in which a female speaker imagines herself driving the sun god Helios’s chariot to destruction. It feels as though our work has always been in conversation.”
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry.