2013 Student Poetry Award

Gabrielle Calvocoressi on Lizza Rodriguez

I was dilly dialing/when the phones rang/then I ran out/ like red roses. If that perfect balance of formal rigor and imaginative acrobatics is any indication, the world of American poetry has a great deal to look forward to as the poet comes into their maturity. The great pleasure "Glory Be What Going See" affords the reader is its ability to take objects of the everyday (planes and fire engines, cockpits and luggage) and through the use of surprising syntactic patterns open to a world of physical and emotive meanings and consequences that move beyond what one might normally expect of the poem. At the same time this isn't simply play for play's sake. As the poem progresses and becomes more comfortable with its own dialect the connections become increasingly intimate, this becomes a poem about gender and the relationship of power to scale. Notice how the speaker recedes by rising 30,00 feet and how doubt creeps into this poem at the moment of greatest physical distance. "But maybe I don't need to see it all" That's quite a claim a quite a bit of distance traveled from the burning buildings and high voltage wires at the start of the poem. This is a poet who knows how to use syntax and the line to keep us moving forward without losing our sense of being deeply grounded in the poem. That's something that often takes a long time to learn and one often has to relearn that skill. The poem is funny and smart and makes the reader turn back for a moment to see how the poet did that. And the language and technical skill is bracing enough that we don't turn back for long because we want to see how it's going to all turn out.