Grand Prize, Honorable Mention; The Da Vinci Eye, Finalist; Montaigne Medal, Finalist
Grand Prize, Honorable Mention; The Da Vinci Eye, Finalist; Montaigne Medal, Finalist
"Just the way CavanKerry Press joyfully merges two Irish counties for its name, so its philosophy jubilantly combines Passion with Craft. Places We Return To is a treasure chest retrospective featuring a single selection from each CavanKerry book published in the last two decades. Valuing emotion and all its secret sources, as well as those bursts of interior song that surprise us when we reach a wellspring, CavanKerry prizes the personal voice—knowing what a radical act that can be, and also knowing it’s the way to the universal. That’s all here in this celebratory anthology, produced with the stunning design that has distinguished the press from a zygote of an idea to its full, expansive, generous presence today. There’s another important fusing, too: each poet here became part of a CavanKerry family of authors, the splendid result of voice, line, and design that makes marvels of their books."
"The poets of CavanKerry Press tap your shoulder and invite you into their living room. You can sit here, and warm your hands on the different variants of what happens to humans, poem by poem, page by page, book by book, year by year. The best poems know how to catch experience and sing it true, and this book is filled with nothing but best poems. These gathered voices-old, young, rich, not so rich, urban and rural, love verse and they love the world. The house CavanKerry builds in this anthology suits its mission to a T; there are rooms available for all of us to wander. Think of our world. Now, think of our world without poetry. Now, open this book."
Joan Cusack Handler is the founder of CavanKerry Press. She is a poet, memoirist, and a psychologist in clinical practice. She is the author of four books, most recently,
Orphans. Gabriel Cleveland is the managing editor for CavanKerry Press. He is a poet and fiction writer and mental health advocate, working to raise awareness, visibility, and money for psychological and psychosocial issues.