Dear Wallace

<p><strong>Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry</strong></p><p><em>Dear Wallace</em> addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art power and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility. Exploring relationships between modernism motherhood poetry and privilege the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious funny and wry Julie Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. As we struggle to marry creative independence with our communal obligations the questions in these poems are more urgent than ever. Stevens a proxy for beauty inventiveness and legitimacy becomes an audience for the ennui anxiety and politics of care that characterize another kind of writer's life today. </p><p><br></p><p><strong>Julie Choffel</strong> is an assistant professor in English at the University of Connecticut Hartford. She is the author of <em>The Hello Delay</em>.</p><p><br></p>