THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE
OCTOBER 2020We are pleased to announce that Danielle Dubrasky is runner-up for The Hopper Poetry Prize for her manuscript Lighting Out for the Invisible.
The storytelling in these poems is captivating, drawing readers in from beginning to end through the interplay of memory with the land. Each poem conveys something new even within the confines of the narrator’s personal relationships and traumas. The manuscript is a lushly textured world of dream and myth converging in this daily lived world of pennies and leaf blowers. So evocative how the mundane world of grocery store parking lots can slide into an encounter with Freya and the timeless. Lighting Out for the Invisible is so rich with stories told and felt on personal and ancestral levels.
—The Hopper Editors
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Under a Warm Green Linden, and Terrain.org. Her chapbook, Ruin and Light, won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems were also published in a limited-edition art book, Invisible Shores (Red Butte Press). She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and twice for Best New Poets. And she is a three-time winner of the Utah Original Writing Competition for poetry. Danielle is also the director of the Eco-poetry and the Essay Conference at Southern Utah University. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah and an MA in English/Creative Writing from Stanford University. Enjoy a poem from Lighting Out for the Invisible below.
Venus
My grandmother watched one blue afternoon
huge waves roll toward the rocks in Monterey Bay,
lunge over the 40-foot sea wall, break at beds of ice plant,
the surge flooding the road, spray striking her window in the cottage
she bought when Cannery Row was still a cannery.
A few hours later police stopped to tell her an earthquake
hit Alaska and sent a tsunami to Pacific Grove—
she never got word it was too dangerous to stay.
Clouds brood over black water splashing rocks
where otters sway in their sleep on kelp beds
and boat lights plumb the surface below the cliff
on my walk along the sea wall fifty years later.
She said it was the most beautiful thing she had seen,
a wave traveling for miles to break shells at her doorstep.