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The American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry 2002 Winner
Kathleen Ossip
Judged by
Beginning in a high-rise hotel and ending with a quasi-mythic suburban idyll, The Search Engine scans a dissonant, saturated environment. Kathleen Ossip's poetry is word-rich and music-lush, lively, witty, and sharp. She deftly records the immediacies of life, interior and exterior, domestic and worldly, here and now.
"Of course one has favorites ("Nursling," "Air," "My Luvox"), but the main thing, the grand affair, is the continuity of utterance and single strictness of what Miss Wickwire used to call the poet's imagination, however "wily and wry" the poet concedes such a thing to be. Expressed piety toward the elders (Moore, Bishop) is nicely lollopped (Ossip's verb) by the wildness, indeed the wilderness of it all. An astonishment, this first book, and what a comfort!"
--Richard Howard
The Rosebud, from The Search Engine
Hello, artifice central? Nah, I
didn't hate it when you (infanta)
and Mr. X frugged in the dooryard
so uncultivated and real slow.
You dig everything magenta,
flying mammals, and the number ten.
Hello, diadem? Pick your poison.
- from Fourteen Rants
Kathleen Ossip was born in Albany, New York. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001, as well as in many journals, including The Paris Review and The Kenyon Review. She teaches at the New School University in New York City.
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