Poet Anna Scotti's collectiono, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, is the winner of the inaugural Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2020. The poems in this book help us to see the miraculous in the broken, the everyday, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness. Poems from this stunning collection have recently appeared in The New Yorker and Yemassee, and have won the Pocataligo Prize for poetry (selected by Nikky Finney) and the Marc Fischer Prize for poetry (selected by Chris Ransick). Ellen Bass says, of Bewildered "I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti's debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love. Heaven is "my sisters stalking and hissing like jealous cats," "a leather handbag, creased and cracked and smellingof perfume and cash." Scotti is a welcoming poet, her lines full of extended family, workmen, strangers, dogs, fish, birds, horses, even a giraffe--all so vivid they seem to exist off the page. Her prose poems are small masterpieces. "Then Fall Again" travels from the "gold, crunch, crisp" of fall to "Buds furled tight along the branch," and back around again. Yet, beyond even these pleasures, what opens our hearts is the book's deep seated kindness. In "T'es Pas Seule", the speaker comforts a car crash victim "in every language I can muster...Todo esta bien. Tranquille, cherie.T'es pas seule. Rest easy, rest easy, you aren't, just yet, alone." Frank Gaspar says: "I am one of those fortunate people who can say that I have known Anna Scotti's poetry for many years. Hers is a voice that permeates her work with such definition that the reader comes to know the poems as intimate gestures, a circling of truths. It is exhilarating to absorb the energy of this poetry. Bewildered By All This Broken Sky is a living world unto itself--a place in the universe where you will dwell in a consciousness that contains, well...multitudes, including the "horned-rimmed god of unfinished term papers," and people who forage in the city dawn beneath skyscrapers, "gathering the birds that have crashed the great walls of mirrored windows." The deft surprises go on and on, and you'll want to read this book forever."
