The Ripped-Out Seam

This is the prize-winning poet's first collection. The poems in this collection are various in style, from the highly experimental to shape poems to prose poems to sequences, and in subject matter, from the personal subjects of family, to various landscapes, predominantly that of New Mexico, and to historical and philosophical themes. The volume contains two collections: THE RIPPED-OUT SEAM and VOLTE, and etchings from the great Spanish painter Goya. Poems from this collection won the Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America: the Bogin Award is given to a group of four or five poems that reflect "the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, uses language in an original way, and takes a stand against oppression in any of its forms." Poems from the volume also won the Writers' Exchange Award, and the volume itself was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Poems in the volume previously appeared in American Poetry Review, The American Writer, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Croton Review, Cutbank, Indiana Review, Negative Capability, PSA News, Poem, South Coast Poetry Journal, The Taos Review, Triquarterly, The Denny Poems and have been anthologized in NEW MEXICO POETRY RENAISSANCE, (Red Crane 1994) and SALUDOS: POEMAS DE NUEVO MEXICO (Pennywhistle Press 1995).