The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story

Poetry. Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. In the aftermath of her father's death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison's exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation as she reconciles herself to loss. This book-length sequence is the silvery underside of elegy, a lyric of living acceptance paced with "the linen texture of right silences." "Rusty Morrison's THE TRUE KEEPS CALM BIDING ITS STORY brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book"--Peter Gizzi.

Rusty Morrison's first poetry collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing 2004), selected by Forrest Gander. She has been a recipient of the Cecil Hemley (2006), and Robert H. Winner (2003) Memorial Awards from The Poetry Society of America, which also awarded the true keeps calm biding its story the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize for a manuscript in progress.