The Madeleine Poems Format: Paperback

Ann Lauterbach, the highly esteemed poet who selected Paul Legault's manuscript for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, explains that in these poems, “History is here, in uneasy tangents; landscape is here, lonely in its names; luminous images are here but they are not pictures; music is here in a spare, phrasal pacing… Here, in The Madeleine Poems, modernity's abandonment becomes a bare harbor into which sail vessels carrying unexpected cargo.” In hauntingly beautiful lyricism, and with a lightness that conveys the most weighty of subjects, Legault offers a dynamically charged vision of the real as he perceives its volatile, constantly shifting valences.

PAUL LEGAULT was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a B.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Pleiades, and other journals. He is the co-editor of the translation journal Telephone. Currently, he is working on an English-to-English translation of the complete works of Emily Dickinson, part of which has been published as a chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader, vol. 1 (Try and Make, 2009). Paul lives with his husband, Orion Jenkins, in Brooklyn, NY where he works at the Academy of American Poets.