Bücher der Reihe Louis Award

Winner of the 2022 Concrete Wolf Louis Award'"Sometimes you have to tell a story / your entire life to get it right,"' Emily Ransdell says in this exquisite debut volume of poems. Though richly different, the stories-about family, about our fragile planet, about the ways loss takes its inevitable toll-together relate a single human story. When I read good poems, I may learn about a poet's life. When I read great ones, I learn about my own. One Finch Singing is a book of such poems."-Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky""I was swept away by the taut grace of these lyrical narrative poems."¿¿-Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of When All Else Fails

"Rumors of Wisdom impressed me throughout with poems about very specific things, or memories, or details; specifics that often metaphorically stand for bigger things. The details are interesting and fresh, as in 'Barometer.' The poet uses a good deal of artistic language and viewpoint, as if seeing the world through a painter's eyes. From time to time the odd technical term may pose a challenge, but it also serves as an opportunity for readers to broaden their vocabulary. This collection stands out for its breadth of scope."-Timons Esaias, Louis Award Judge, author of Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek "One finds in this collection poems of the rare sort that come quietly, like a cat prowling about in the midnight hour, looking hard into the darkness for what stirs. Luminous, lyric, sparkling with wit and the kind of subtle wisdom that comes from a long, slow, generous looking at life… these poems are simply irresistible in their appeal."-Mark S. Burrows, Ph.D., Poetry Editor of Spiritus, author of Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul, with Jon M. Sweeney "Remorse and redemption permeate these poems the way 'a mist touches everything.' Spaces are spare, remote, yet welcome with 'a wink of paradise.' What surrounds us is not separable from our being, with 'each of us taking on something of the other.'"-Lana Hechtman Ayers, Managing Editor of Concrete Wolf Press, author of Red Riding Hood's Real Life

"In Amy Miller's The Trouble with New England Girls, love can make you leave, a kiss can make you stay, and floral apologies are so endangered they're illegal but offered anyway. These poems track a wolf through Oregon and track grief across its shifting portraits, but whatever the metaphors pursued here, you never see the end coming. Miller knows what one line can do to another and how an image can make a poem open. Beauty is found in laundromats and pictures of food and from the perspective of drones, in all the places we never expected to find ourselves, and every shadow between ourselves and home." -Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins "These poems brim with keen metaphors and spotlight observations. Intimate descriptions are conveyed like speaking to a friend, and with a humor that animates wide-ranging experiences from lovers to laundromats, even grief. Amy writes with tenderness while wielding metaphors like signal flags. This is assured writing. You will want more. I do." -Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and Precarious