Northwestern University Press is honoured to inaugurate the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize series with Ed Roberson’s Closest Pronunciation. Here is a teacher of poets studying his own assignments, questioning and seeking the generative capacity in looking at and seeing things that ends in the realisation of a poem. In a line from the brief poem
Night Writing,
from which the chapbook draws its title, he writes,
The word closest in pronunciation / To an ambulance’s siren is ‘wrong.’

The collection as a whole gives voice, often quiet but always profound, to many things overlooked and neglected in culture, nature, and everyday life.