The Green Girls, by John Blair

Selected by Cornelius Eady as Winner of the 2003 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize "While art is never a wholly adequate antidote to sorrow, its consolations can be enormous, as they are in John Blair'’s beautifully nuanced and perceptive poems. Even as he leads us back through our own disenchantments, his ‘minor ecstasies of will’ remind us of all there is in the world to love. The Green Girls is luminous in its language, a collection that rewards the reader, as in the title poem, with 'whispers soaked / with the rooted strumming of trees, as light / and as muted as bare green bodies breathing in.'" —Susan Ludvigson