poetry

WA Book Award

No matter who I tell or how many times I say it, the news never ceases to be surreal. Friends, I am a finalist for the Washington State Book Award for my debut full-length poetry book, “Blood Song.”

The awards will be held on October 14th at the Central Library in Seattle. To be held in the same esteem as poets like Paisley Rekdal and Tara Hardy, Don Mee Choi and Megan Snyder-Camp, seems like a strange slip up. These are poets I’ve heard about for years, and who am I but a reader with a golden ticket?

Other nominees in the various other categories include Sherman Alexie, Lindy West, and Ted Chiang. If you live in the Seattle area and attend the ceremony, I’ll be the one looking dazzled but happy, a reader surrounded by writers.

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My Body Mourns, Limb by Limb, As I Recount Your Final Days

I’m happy to have one of my poems featured on the Crab Creek Review blog! It owes a debt to Kevin Young’s beautiful poems in his “Book of Hours.”  If you missed this book when it first came out, I highly recommend going back and remedying that. It is gorgeous.

 

I don’t know what hunger is for

or what to hunger for.

 

You can’t give me

any more anymore.

 

Read the rest of the poem here!

 

 

Honors and Honored

My debut full-length poetry collection “Blood Song” was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award (an award for best book of poetry from an independent or university press) not too long ago and that felt tremendous. It’s an amazing honor to be recognized like that. But equally humbling was the fact Stephen Furlong not only bothered to read my book but felt compelled to write a review of it. Reviewing seems to be an especially thankless genre of writing; I see why hardly anyone does it. Which makes this all the more heart warming to me.

“Vulnerability in Schmeltzer’s writing is one of his poetic strengths,” Stephen writes. As an artist who aims toward the vulnerable, who wants to enact vulnerability not just as craft but as a lifestyle, Stephen’s compliment means the absolute world to me.

Thank you Stephen, and thank you to those involved in the Julie Suk Award process. You all make the writing world a better place.