Bloom and Laceration by Ralph Black

 
 

Winner of the 2017 Hopper Poetry Prize, Ralph Black's book of poetry, Bloom and Laceration, is now available from Green Writers Press.

At a time when the human ravages on the planet seem to be reaching a crescendo, the poems in Bloom and Laceration offer lamentations to a fragmented world and celebrations of beauty’s fierce persistence. Here are lyric poems on the vicissitudes of family played out against wild (and domesticated) nature. Here are long meditations on passing through, on glimpsing, on transience and transcendence.

The Hopper Poetry Prize

AUGUST 2017

We are pleased to announce that Ralph Black is the winner of The Hopper Poetry Prize for his manuscript Bloom and Laceration.

 

By turns tender and serious, heartbroken and filled with heart, Ralph Black's Bloom and Laceration is a praise song for the changing Earth, and for the families—human and otherwise—who populate it. In the opening poem, he tells us with trademark frankness and honesty, "You know what a torn shirt / the world's become." And yet, by the time we finish this astounding collection, we ourselves have become more "wired to the real," attuned again to the undeniable truth and beauty all around us, like "bright-eyed mystics of leaf / and bud and floating seed, clinging and clung to, and all of a piece." Those readers lucky enough to spend time with Bloom and Laceration will find pieces of these poems floating up later in the mind like the favorite lines to a hymn or psalm meant to make everyday life on this often-trying planet all the more bearable, and all the more holy.

—James Crews, author of Telling My Father

 
Ralph Black has published a collection of poetry, Turning Over the Earth, from Milkweed Editions, and a chapbook, The Apple Psalms. He is the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review and the Chelsea Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, Orion, Southern Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. He lives in Rochester, NY, and teaches literature and creative writing at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. Enjoy his poem "Apiarial," from Bloom and Laceration, below.
 

Apiarial

for Anna

My daughter can’t sleep
     for the vanishing bees. She slumps

down the stairs dazed
     as a sleepwalker, a stargazer

trailing a swarm of bad dreams.
     She drifts without moving into

the moon-slatted light
     of the sloping yard. She can’t sleep

as the bees disappear from
     the pecan groves of Georgia, from

the blackberry fields of Maine,
     from the pear orchards of central China.

She turns from vibrating dreams
     of bee-shadows and bee-shrouds,

as scientists parse the broken-down
     machinery of bees, small children

in their front yards looping
     endless chains of clover. Until

the bees reappear, lining up
     along the branches of the linden, her

story-laden tree. They park there,
     fifty on one branch, a hundred

on another, a fleet of tiny buses
     idling into the future. She knows

about compound eyes, their
     seven-thousand hexagonal lenses.

She knows how those tiny windows
     help orchestrate the light:

a thousand shifting facets, a million
     maps danced into the air.

The night is filled with zithering,
     and a girl who carries inside her

the violet hum of meadows,
     a steady, quickening blur.