We're thrilled to share the news that Akron Poetry Prize winning collection Doe by Aimée Baker has won the Eugene Paul Nassar Award.
We're thrilled to share the news that Akron Poetry Prize winning collection Doe by Aimée Baker has won the Eugene Paul Nassar Award.
In selecting Doe, judge Naomi Guttman wrote: My choice for the 2018 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize is Aimée Baker’s Doe, published by The University of Akron Press. A terrible beauty is born in this book-length elegy for female victims of kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder; the presumed dead, the disappeared, and the unidentified. These last, for whom the book is named, remind us of women’s universal vulnerability as the hunted gender. In language both violent and tender, the book exhumes the cases of women from across the continent and the century, bearing witness to their spirits, prayers, and passions. Doe is a suite of gorgeously orchestrated poems that remind us not to turn away from the news. Instead, it commands us to resist injustice with the compassion that only art can bring to life. I wholly admire this haunting, stunning, and necessary book, and I endorse it with no reservations.