Things are Happening (APR Honickman 1st Book Award)

Joshua Beckman, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is one of those poets whose work you mustn't miss. His talent shines in his ability to make disparate events become part of a whole. "Purple Heart Highway" constructs loss as imminent danger ("where a train might mistakenly come") or as the pendulum between routine and chaos ("a gray grinning calmness / from which you can get nothing to wake") or as a sudden realization that threads far back into one's past ("I woke up to a plate full of no options / echoing through the cupped ear of my life / spinning the wheels that wouldn't, / for anything, take me away").

In "Winter's Horizon" the theme of loss seeks--and finds--its own sensibilities. A boy writes a story about a father who rides off into the sunset on his riding lawnmower. The boy feels his story is full of meaning, his mother hates it, and his teacher gives it an A+. Yet the lines between fiction and fact, between father and son, and between desire and loss are only the thinnest membranes: "like an engine / steadily moving away / until it is a thin line / of reverberation / ...and its being gone / gives you a terrible sense / a terrible sense of completeness / a terrible sense that things like this / will continue to happen." --Susan Swartwout