Imagine a Town: None: 4 (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions)

We are happy to congratulate Barbara Sabol of Akron OH for winning Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Second Annual Full-Length Poetry Manuscript Prize for her work Imagine a Town. The poems in Imagine A Town reveal how a confederacy of places--a hometown adopted city a neighborhood--conspires to shape identity especially when ones sense of self butts up against the values and expectations embraced by that place. These narratives convey how a girls long view is foreshortened by smokestacks slim resources and the rough Alleghenies circling her blue-collar existence. Self-discovery also manifests through a reckoning of events outside the kitchen window and in the wider world. Conversely distance from the speakers origins gently tightens the grasp of that place as she reconciles inevitable losses and regrets exacted by her departure. Memories of coming-of-age in a time of milkmen and trolley cars prompt a visitation to a hometown thats taken up residence in the poets imagination as she journeys through place and time. Also infusing these poems is the tension of a constructed suburban world imposed on the natural world such that the sight of a buck in a neighbors yard startles a renewed connection with nature and an awareness of deeper losses. The concept of home a longing to belong and the risks and rewards of carving an outsider existence lie at the beating heart of this collection.