The Angel of Obsession

About

Winner of the 1991 Arkansas Poetry Award

Others may lament the uncertainties and disappointments of life, but Julie Suk, winner of the second annual Arkansas Poetry Award, embraces its tumult. Turning from the unsullied angels and the paradises captured by generations of artists, these poems focus instead on those who have abandoned heaven for the world of such mundane matters as family, loneliness, love, and loss. Rousing us to the passion and wonder that define our essential humanity, The Angel of Obsession celebrates the full, ragged canvas of living.

Suk’s poetry has previously appeared in The Georgia Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry, and other important literary magazines. The Angel of Obsession was selected for publication from a field of more than five hundred entries by the poet John Stone.

Awards

1992 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award
1993 Bess Hokin Prize, Poetry Magazine

Praise

“Vivid, precise, genuine and daring, the poems in this book lodge in the heart as securely as the greetings of lovers. A fine achievement.”
—Fred Chappell

“Often, in these disturbingly beautiful poems, dreams chart the by-ways of our waking lives, telling us, through rich and sensuous imagery, what happens when the roads turn, when paths take unpredicted directions. The Angel of Obsession is a wise book whose consolation is in its deeply resonate language, its truths.”
—Susan Ludvigson

“So many poems, past and current, seem to have been too easily born, as if their authors were merely wishing to be poets. But everywhere in Julie Suk’s book we are confronted with passion, that uniquely human gift—and curse—for deep and conscious commitment. Line after line of her poetry is brief and spare, as if cut precisely and painfully from the stone of an earth that is, for good and ill, no heaven.”
—Stephen Corey

“Deeply Sexual, haunted and beautiful, Suk’s finely imagined poems surprise with the depth of their passion and compassion, and with an urgent, almost violent honesty.”
—Betty Adcock

Author

Julie Suk is the author of six books of poetry and the coeditor of Bear Crossings: an Anthology of North American Poets. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Laurel Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her awards include the Roanoke-Chowan Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine. She is a former managing editor of Southern Poetry Review.