2019 Four Quartets Prize

Dante Micheaux was awarded the 2019 Four Quartets Prize for his book Circus (Indolent Books, 2018).

Citation

How right that this poet's first name should be Dante. For hisCircus is a Comedy: a savage comedy, lacerating dialects, fingering wounds, looking for loves right and wrong in the crevices of history and of humiliated bodes. And yet, and yet. His language exults, triumphs, and freely rummages in the treasuries of the Bible, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, Baraka, and Mahalia Jackson, taking what it needs, making it his sovereign own, a wrested blessing. Congratulations, Dante Micheaux, on your astonishing Circus.


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