2011 Omnidawn First/Second Poetry Book Contest Winner — Judge: C.D. Wright

kathryn l. pringle — Book Title: fault tree

“In kathryn l. pringle’s fault tree, the sina qua non of time is nested in the figure of the speaker. Some would call him a quixotic time traveler, diagnosed and medicated accordingly for a debilitating fixation on time and its ‘lessness’ in which all of us have to situate our persuasively finite states. Some would say the case for simultaneity is convincing—everything occurring at the same time everywhere, and for the infinite as well—no beginning, middle or end. The speaker ‘recovers’ but doesn’t surrender. ‘You wake up or you wake up//most people wake up.’ The language is beautiful in its plainness coeval with branching analytical digressions of time out of mind. A compelling wackiness attaches to the voice, and as with any resistant, sensitive patient, all systems are at risk of becoming transparent: ‘the government wanted us lit up/ so we could light up/ which is important when yr being taught to kill/ or having to think about killing/ having been raised not to/ think or kill.’ What if a perceptional swerve were empirically shown to be the last barrier to ‘the company transition[ing] us to robots.’ This is a wondrous, unnerving book.” —C.D. Wright, Contest Judge

Poet kathryn l. pringle lives in Oakland, California. She received her MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of one book of poetry, RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY (Factory School) and two chapbooks, The Stills (Duration Press) and Temper and Felicity are lovers (TAXT). Her work can also be found in the anthologyConversations at the Wartime Cafe: A Decade of War (Conversations at the Wartime Cafe Press/WODV Press) and in the forthcoming anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues). She is currently writing a novel about place.

The Finalists of the 2011 First/Second Book Competition chosen by C.D. Wright (in alphabetical order by last name) are: Jill Darling, Mount Clemens, Michigan; Leora Fridman, Florence, Massachusetts; Eryn Green, Denver, Colorado; Jane Gregory, Berkeley, California; and Soham Patel, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.