Szporluk has new poetry book, NEA fellowship

Forces of nature, bits of fable, mythic voices—all are elements of the poetry of Larissa Szporluk, English and Creative Writing Program faculty member.

Szporluk’s work has recently been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts with a $20,000 literature fellowship in poetry. The news of the award was greeted with extra pleasure by the Creative Writing Program. As director Wendell Mayo said, the program is now in the unusual position of being “four for four,” with all its faculty having received the NEA fellowship within the last three years.

Szporluk will use the NEA funds to support work on her latest book of poetry, the inspiration for which came from a landmark mountain in Italy known as Monte Circeo. Named after the mythic witch-goddess Circe, the mountain “looks like a fallen head looking up at the sky. It’s very mysterious and beautiful,” the poet explained.
Szporluk has both regarded and climbed the mountain, which on one side is covered with olive trees and wildflowers and, on the other side, facing the sea, treacherous steep rocks.

The poems in this as-yet unnamed collection are “more experimental. I’m doing things I’ve never done before, but I’m encouraged and inspired by the work I’ve just finished,” she said.

That work, Inside the Dog-Fish, will be published in September by Alice James Books.
Szporluk said she is pleased with the book. “It’s the culmination of everything I’ve learned. It combines technical skills with some far-sighted projects. I feel very good about it.”

The publisher writes of Inside the Dog-Fish, “Haunting and spare, Larissa Szporluk’s eagerly-awaited third collection is obsessed with fate’s fickle nature. Propelled by internal rhyme, these lyric poems draw on fairy tales and fables, stories from the Bible and from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, their characters blown hither and thither by mythic winds—but inevitably, toward an awareness of mortality.”

The work is infused with intimations of a force—the wind, or a mysterious energy—that stirs even inanimate objects into life. But though she gives more attention to narrative in Inside the Dog-Fish than in her previous work, the language itself is still the most essential element of the poems, Szporluk said.

Szporluk's second book of poetry, Isolato, published in 2000 by University of Iowa Press, received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and her first book, Dark Sky Question, published in 1998 by Beacon Press, was the winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize.