Logan Fry, class of 2010, English and Creative Writing major, recently won the Omnidawn Publishing "2019 First/Second Poetry Book Prize for Harpo Before the Opus. He received $3,000, publication by Omnidawn Publishing, and 100 author copies. Srikanth Reddy judged. The annual award is given for a first or second poetry collection," according to Poets & Writers. The publisher's description of the book reads as follows:
The poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections.
In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fry’s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit.
Logan Fry resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, Caroline, and their three boys, Wolfie, Hank Scorpio, and Barthelme. He received his MFA at the University of Texas and now teaches writing at Texas State University. Fry is the founding editor of Flag + Void, and his poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Fence, West Branch, Boston Review, Prelude, Denver Quarterly, and the Best American Experimental Writing anthology.
Click here to visit Fry's personal site. Harpo Before the Opus will be available for purchase in October 2019.
