BLOOD ALMANAC
BY SANDY LONGHORN
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Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (2005)

"Say prairie," the speaker instructs and thus the persuasive music of these poems calls us "into the darkness or the future." Whether evoking the very American landscape of Midwestern farms or tracing a more interior journey, Sandy Longhorn writes not only of solitude and longing but also of the power of language and its mysterious twin, quiet attention, to brighten the way. Here is the accuracy of faith. Here, a series of "momentary constellations" flickering. Here, poems "both diary and document/ held open and up to the light." -- Mary Ann Samyn

Sandy Longhorn writes beautifully and convincingly of the Great Plains and of her native Iowa. Her vision of that landscape's open skies and flatland and distance seems richer and more nuanced than any I have seen before. She sings of its unsung inhabitants in musical, authentic, and moving lines. A necessary and great first book. -- Davis McCombs

This is a beautiful yet modest and unassuming book, one that claims less than it accomplishes, transfiguring personal narrative and landscape into things rich and strange, yet always still themselves: in it, "The air is heavy with the desire to claw beneath/the surfaces of things." This work gives voice to and raises its voice out of "the voice-swallowing plains," and the harsh midwestern prairies that yield their harvest only to the strictest effort are both subject matter and formal analogy for these paradoxically lush and austere poems. "I mean to be accurate/and true," Longhorn writes. If accuracy is faithfulness to fact, and truth is the halo that illuminates and transforms fact, this book is indeed both. --Contest judge Reginald Shepherd