The Missouri Review

We are happy to present in this issue the winners of the 7TH annual Editor's Prize, including the first winner of the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry. Larry, a co-founder of THE MISSOURI REVIEW, was beloved by many students and friends who have cooperated generously to make the Levis Prize possible. Michael Pettit's winning selection of poems, as it happens, shares with much of Larry's an atmospheric melancholy, a subtle sense of humor, and a capacity for word intoxication.

This year's Editor's Prize winner in fiction, Alice Fulton, is also primarily known as a poet. Fulton's winning "Happy Dust" is a brilliant, historically authentic portrait of an Irish immigrant in New York in the early twentieth century, a sickly, hard-working young woman with a rock-solid character and a scintillating view of the world. Pregnant with her fifth child, faced with dangers both obvious and unobvious, she may or may not make it through this birthing. It's an old-fashioned story in some ways, full of memorable characters, including a friend who is poisoning herself for beauty, a nun who suffers for Christ, and a kindly but misguided doctor who dispenses the latest powerful painkiller (heroin powder) to alleviate the pregnant woman's symptoms.