Winner, 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

A Publisher's Weekly Top Five Poetry Book of 2013
Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry

"In her gorgeous second collection, Mary Szybist blends traditional and experimental aesthetics to recast the myth of the Biblical Mary for this era. In vulnerable lyrics, surprising concrete poems, and other forms, and with extraordinary sympathy and a light touch of humor, Szybist probes the nuances of love, loss, and the struggle for religious faith in a world that seems to argue against it. This is a religious book for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary doubts for the faithful."  — National Book Award Committee

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Purchase: Graywolf Press / Amazon / Local bookstore

“Mary Szybist’s poems are about religious and sexual longing and about suspicion of religious and sexual longing. They exist in, or move toward, the negative spaces, the luminous, maddening almost presences the objects of our deepest desires inhabit. She has a gift for music, a gift for aphorism, a gift for being haunted. This is serious work, so it is occasionally funny and sometimes strange and often beautiful. ‘Original research in language,’ Ezra Pound said the real thing was. This is it.”  —Robert Hass

2002 Beatrice Hawley Award
2004 Great Lakes Colleges Association of New Writers Award
2003 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Listed among the "Best Poetry of 2003" by Library Journal

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Purchase: Alice James Books / Amazon /  Local bookstore