A Tree Becomes a Room
FEATURED
White Pine Press is pleased to announce that J.P. White has been awarded the Twenty-Eighth Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize for his manuscript, A Tree Becomes A Room.
“These are poems that move through the world, by land and water, taking us along in their wake. We’re right there picking loquats on the Italian coast, eating rabbit in Lourmarin, then somehow crossing the salt distance to Maui to look into the eyes of an old sea turtle. All the while, plumbing the waters of the psyche for what can be saved in a world that is both exquisite and unraveling. These poems make us believe that, just maybe, ‘Paradise is already here/on the other side of elegy.’”
Danusha Lemeris
White Pine Press Poetry Judge
Poetry
A Tree Becomes a Room
The poems are meditations on this perilous moment in time and the demands that this moment places on anyone to stay curious and grateful even in the midst of our inability to change course or self-correct with a view toward the greater interconnectedness of all things.
All Good Water
Holy Cow! Press , 2010
“Before heaven will suffice, I go listening for a word,
Its oily meat, its newborn orbit. Come with me, now.”
The Pomegranate
Tree Speaks from the Dictators Garden
Holy Cow! Press, 1988
“More lives. Who doesn’t carry this hunger
Under their tongue like a good luck charm?”
The Sleeper at the Party
Defined Providence Press, 2001
“Like the others, we came for intoxication.
To bask in the idea of the beautiful city.”
In Pursuit of Wings
Panache Books, 1978
“I crouched over the stern listening
To my deadly hook tapping like a silver cane.”
The Salt Hour
The Salt Hour, University of Illinois Press, 2001
“What did my father call this life? One salt hour between two eternities.”
About J.P. White
J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry in over a hundred publications. A highly acclaimed, award-winning writer, White pushes beyond the boundaries of the lyric/narrative tradition to let more of the flux and wonder of the human condition rush in.
