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The 2007 final judge, Stephen Dunn, has awarded the Akron Poetry Prize to Brian Brodeur for his manuscript “Other Latitudes.”  This year, 530 manuscripts were considered in the contest.

About the winning manuscript, Stephen Dunn wrote:

In “Other Latitudes,” Brian Brodeur’s excellent and finely measured first collection, he writes, “Light moves across the counter, almost touching her hand, / shattering over an open drawer of knives.”  It is an image typical of his ability to yoke the beautiful and the dangerous, and offer them to us without prejudice; in fact, with an equilibrium that bespeaks an inclusive, clear-eyed engagement with the world.  In another poem, he gives petty criminals, who play at being Bonnie and Clyde, alternating voices and surprising sympathies; in yet another, an art teacher and his model deliver soliloquies that both individuate and conjoin them.  Brodeur’s world is a world of layers and shadings.  His diction is limpid and precise, his ear a fine-tuned instrument for registering nuance.  And when he writes about nature, he’s equally adept, employing a vocabulary that does what the best nature writing can do: reinvigorate its subject.  The aster, for example, “spreads its spiny / roots through chaff, unfurls / in cold clusters, tussocks / shaking, feeds / on ditch water, the sweet / decay found there.”  Among the several good manuscripts I encountered while judging this prize, “Other Latitudes” stood out, kept drawing me to it.  I’m pleased to have found such poems, and such a talent.

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