The Glacier’s Wake Wins the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize

“Didden’s is a capacious voice, able at once to deliver both wit and wonder, canny insight and meditative mystery.”—Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

In her first poetry collection The Glacier’s Wake, Katy Didden attends to the large-scale tectonics of the natural world as she considers the sources and aftershocks of mortality, longing, and loss. A number of the poems in the collection are monologues in recurring voices—specifically those of a glacier, a sycamore, and a wasp—offering an inventive, prismatic approach to Didden’s ambitious subject matter. In The Glacier’s Wake, the scientific, the elegiac, and the fantastical intertwine in the service of considering our human place—constructive and destructive, powerful and impermanent—amidst the massive shiftings that are occurring endlessly all around us.

A Washington, D.C. native, Katy Didden holds degrees from Washington University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Missouri. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as Best New Poets 2009, Crazyhorse, Ecotone, The Journal, Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, Image, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry. Former poetry editor for The Missouri Review, Didden currently lives in St. Louis, where she is a postdoctoral fellow at St. Louis University.

April 22, 2013
92 pages, 6 x 9
978-0-8071-5200-3
Paper $17.95
Distributed for Winthrop University and Pleiades Press