Several American Flowers by Bridget O'Bernstein

Selected and Introduced by Eileen Myles

This procession of poems has such a rough and changeable beauty. It starts somewhere and you begin to get conditions and then the relief of
a flower. These combinations in all the elegant and fervent ways that make a poem are mightily political. Is incarceration in itself a crime. I think, sure. Everything starts somewhere, in a prison, near a crime scene. The poem gathers these conditions and then the relief of a flowerlike, you can see something and then you see it different. Humans living in a world with flowers, accolade to a harshness or they came first, something did, and we live around them and we go and they continue.

—Eileen Myles

Edition: 500 copies of the winning books were printed by the Prolific Group and designed by Gabriele Wilson, with covers by Duncan Hannah.