Winner
of the 2004 CustomWords Poetry Prize: Things
That Ease Despair by Candice Favilla
In
its oblique narratives and lyrics that embody emotion through their erasure,
Candice Favilla’s Things That Ease Despair is an interrogation
of history, poetic technique, and our connections to our lives. This challenging
collection never ceases its demands on the reader’s collaboration
in the poems, nor ceases rewarding that attention.
Sample Poems by Candice Favilla
“Springing from the intersections of the natural and the metaphysical
worlds, of the personal and the political, these large and deeply intelligent
poems by Candice Favilla are not to be read in a hurry. Instead, they
invite the reader to slow down, to savor, to be carried on cascades of
language that follow ‘Truth’s hazardous career,’ as
the poet takes on the weighty topics of war, of corporate plunder, the
loss of parents, the stories of the ‘unblessed working poor.’
The nature of happiness. The soul in dialogue with itself.
Leaping easily between the landscape of our perceptions and the philosophical
constructs that hold them in place (and questions that shake them out
of it), the poems in Things That Ease Despair are songs of love
and grief, of the many forms paradox can take—their music entirely
original, resonant with our own deepest recognitions. The enormous scope
of this book stuns me, carries me into new territories of understanding.
These poems extend the boundaries of my life.”— Ingrid Wendt
“Things That Ease Despair is a book of wonderful, interlocking
gestures—poetry with prose, comedy with elegy, freedom with fate,
ecstasy with despair. Whether looking at the intense, the complicated,
the lofty, or the seedy, whether written about work or love, Candice Favilla
refuses to look away from the ugly, the wounded, and the hard truths,
and she sees in all things beauty and hope.”—David Biespiel
Candice Favilla grew up in an almond-farming family in Chico, California.
Her first book, Cups, was published by the University of Georgia
Press, and her poetry has appeared widely in journals. Favilla lives in
Bandon, Oregon, and teaches literature and writing at Southwestern Oregon.
ISBN 1932339973, $17.00