Contest Winner: The Habit of Buenos Aires

Tebot Bach, the folks who sponsor the long running reading series on the last Friday of every month (held at Goldenwest College), also sponsor the Patricia Bibby Book Award.

The deadline for this year's contest is October 31.

The judge is David St. John.



The winner of last year's contest is Lorraine Healy - and over at Letras Latinas, they offer a excerpt from her winning collection, now published as a book, The Habit of Buenos Aires.

Check it out by clicking here.

from David St. John:

Lorraine Healy has drawn the title of her always powerful and consistently stunning collection of poems, The Habit of Buenos Aires, from an epigraph by Eavan Boland: "What I had lost/ was not land/ but the habit of land." Many of the poems in this collection echo the Peron years, and the long years of anguish—under the military junta—that held Argentina in their grip (Healy was born in Buenos Aires and lived there into her late twenties). This volume is both a personal record and a poetic autobiography fixed in time and place, and yet these poems gather to form a spiritual and political accounting as well. They also chart the cartography of a land slowly being lost to violence and lies and corruption; the poet, in the act of writing these poems, seeks to make her claim—a new claim, a poetic claim—on the land that was once her home. Muscular and immediate, these poems are resonant with superb details that allow, even at their darkest moments, an exceptional intimacy between the poet and her readers.

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