Instant Winner

Praise for Carrie Fountain's previous collection, Burn Lake

"Fountain is a keen observer and has a knack for selecting startling details that the reader immediately feels are true. . .Fountain's poems are firmly colloquial, yet she renders the intensity of her vision in language filled with a shimmering heat that seems mimetic of the New Mexico setting, and fitting for a poet who is so fearless a chronicler of desire."--The Hudson Review

"Reading Carrie Fountain's compelling debut collection, Burn Lake, I was reminded of Heraclitus' axiom 'Geography is Fate.' It is the geography of the New Mexico desert, interstate highways, and a man-made lake that informs these poems and undergirds the contemplation of the emotional geography of loss and longing. With grace and a keen attention to the implications of history, the poems in Burn Lake grapple with what it means to be tied to a place, knowing that our own losses are not only what is taken from us, but also what we take from others."--Natasha Trethewey

"Carrie Fountain writes wondrous poems of such transporting movement and time-depth, we could all be everywhere we've ever loved, teenagers again, or a hundred years from now, sky-shimmering, containing it all." --Naomi Shihab Nye

"In Burn Lake Carrie Fountain's poems join intensity of vision to a verbal firmness which is uncommon and very satisfying. Her work reminds me of the poems of Marie Howe and of Brigit Kelly; like them, Fountain is a seeker, and like them, she holds herself to the rigorous standards of observation and deduction that make spiritual intelligence convincing. And these are spiritual poems-- tough, alert, and never sentimental, but written by a soul cast fatally into the material world, always looking for the truth behind, under, and beyond. Burn Lake goes at experience as if it were a closed fist, then forces that fist open to show what is inside." --Tony Hoagland

"I'm stunned by the power of these poems. Here's all the real trouble we're in: death and time and pain held in a clear crisp collection that seems made of joy. More than a dozen times I laughed out loud. How is this possible? Burn Lake is a miracle." --Marie Howe