“Difficult as it is to describe honestly the spectacle of living, to describe death and dying is to go almost where language can’t: past knowledge, experience, or the reliable image. Yet what An Elegy achieves, through its own assured music, is this very contradiction: to go ‘in places where you never were,’ to honor the dead as well as to reimagine them, knowing that grief is as much the mind’s ‘calculus of human work’ as it is the heart’s. Here are words worth their urgency.”

                            –Rickey Laurentiis, Boy with Thorns, winner,      

                              2016 Levis Reading Prize