Omena Bay Testament

Winner of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Prize Gail Griffin's "Omena Bay Testament" takes us across landscapes of winter and water through the possibility of love and the tragedy of death to a ravishing moment where there is nothing left to want. An accomplished nonfiction writer, Griffin captures the fullness and limitations of being with remarkable depth and tenacity in her debut collection of poetry and prose. "I'm cloaked in the invisibility that comes to women at a certain point," she writes, and it is from that place of being off-stage where her narratives-harrowing, nuanced, layered-brilliantly forge a path between past and present, the living and the dead. I can't think of another book that gifts its readers with such a breadth of time and experience. Sweeping and seamless, Griffin shifts between wide and exacting gazes, from poems of quiet interiority to the larger breaking world, especially with her masterful sequence in response to news excerpts. This book is a life; it is a gift of integrity and lasting art. -Jennifer K. Sweeney