Ann Pedone, whose work was in v1n4 was named winner of the 2022 Press 53 Award for Poetry for her collection The Italian Professor’s Wife, which will be published by Press 53 on April 3, 2022.
Brian Stefans, professor of English at UCLA and author of Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Rimbaud, says, “The poems in The Italian Professor’s Wife move with a quiet intensity, the pitch rarely rising above the level of a deeply internal heartbreak, its pecked phrases seeming to ‘leave a lot out’ in the manner of the New York School, but which can at times be startlingly revealing—mentally and sexually vulnerable—before inviting the reader to take a stance on an unfolding tale of betrayal: ‘His lies, I should add, have always been very poetic.’ Most remarkably, perhaps, is how Pedone often allows images to abandon us, her readers, such that the book escapes the bounds of literary narrative and becomes more the shot-list of a short, quasi-Surrealist film: ok escapes the bounds of literary narrative and becomes more the shot-list of a short, quasi-Surrealist film: ‘The husband looks up at the sky / and opens his mouth twice.’ This is a lovely, engaging little book!”
The Italian Professor’s Wife was selected by Press 53 poetry series editor Tom Lombardo from more than four hundred manuscripts from poets in forty-four states and the District of Columbia. Pedone’s book will be published by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection.
Ann Pedone has published the chapbooks The Bird Happened (Leave Books), perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho (Cup and Dagger Press), DREAM/WORK, and Everywhere You Put Your Mouth (Halas Press). Her second book-length collection of poems, The Medea Notebooks will be published by Etruscan Press in Spring 2023. Pedone’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Journal of Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Juked, Carve Magazine, Abralemin, JuxtaProse, and Menacing Hedge. She graduated from Bard College, and earned an MA in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. Ann Pedone lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.