Lost Horse Press Announces Idaho Prize

I’m fascinated by the formal deftness of these couplets—three per page of almost exactly the same length (without word-processing assistance)—which are, yes, a set of fence rails (and I love the invisible, stolid posts). There are readers who would find that sort of strategy suspect: the idea that a formal or structural device could shape a collection in a meaningful way. But in this case, it is so very well done. The collection’s personal, at least historically personal—family history, in which we get to know an evermore silent coal miner father and a eerily silent-but-communicative mother, as well as the fences, literal and figurative, that keep them separate and together. The family is the fence and the fence is the family; we’re on one side, and we’re on the other side of those rails. Add to this certain aspects of astronomical physics (black holes, the big bang, the sound of the universe speaking), and the book is both modest and immensely ambitious. Finally, in regards to a blind evaluation: most of the way through the manuscript, I’m unaware of the poet’s gender. I gather, from a later poem, that the poet may be a woman, but I’m not ready to bet yet. There’s something wonderful about that.

Robert Wrigley, Judge, 2017 Idaho Prize for Poetry

As Funkhouser navigates the systems of silence in her family’s legacy, she brings into the conversation a discussion of the gravitational waves of black holes, now detectable across the solar system. “I read,” she writes in “#17,” “that a sense / of place is the torque between temperament and terrain. A personal chirp in / one’s universe. It helps me to understand my mother if I think of her / as an event that took place in distant space and, because its waves / could travel unimpeded by matter, has finally brought its birdsong / to earth.” The speaker in Post and Rail comes to listen in silence and gesture for meaning transmitted without speech: the way a fern plays with light or a child’s forehead, pressed against a cow’s head’s “galaxies of coal-black fur,” feels warmth [pour] into us from another world.” Like these phenomena of the natural world, the speaker’s mother “had a way of alerting / us to the fact that we were loved; we had to supply the words ourselves.”

Lisa Russ Spar in Ron Slate’s On the Seawall