Winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award.
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach won the 2022 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Contest judge, Candice Reffe describes the book: These dazzling prose poems are a portal into "a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what's been sought but never found briefly ajar." Enter. Details of ordinary life--the scraping of a spoon, the "fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk"--shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you've been waiting for.
"These dazzling prose poems are a portal into 'a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what's been sought but never found briefly ajar.' Enter. Details of ordinary life--the scraping of a spoon, the "fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk'--shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you've been waiting for.
"DEGREES OF ROMANCE constructs a world from a cool and fevered strangeness, from the collision of language that breaks the boundary between the seen and unseen, from a dense and alluring music--one suspects the poet has found the original divine composition that sang us into being, a song all creatures, the living, the dead, the unborn, are attuned to. A world where even in contradiction we exist in harmony.
One thing transforms into another, kaleidoscopic, a profound act of alchemy animated by animals--grackles, fruit flies, elephants--by humans--grocers, government agents, critics and composers, a flatulent philosopher. They're funny. They pull the unexpected out of a hat shaped like a prose poem that contains multitudes, that travels the space time continuum, so we might 'grasp' our 'impermanence, ' 'the unweighable bliss of a leaf in an updraft, ' the day with its 'preposterous charm.' Like a 'pheromoned trail' left by the bellies of ants these poems leave a scent that guides us, fugitives finding our way to each other, to the light that binds us to this world, the lucky ones who mold 'confusion into awe.'"--Candice Reffe, Contest Judge
Poetry.