Prospect

The Twenty-Sixth Winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. Prospect comprises poems about vantage points, country and personhood, and the difficulty of understanding what is true. Through meticulously articulated explorations of knowledge, truth, language, and sciences explanatory power, Prospect propels us toward grasping even the metaphysical. Claire Sylvester Smith was drawn to medicineand ultimately ophthalmologybecause of the challenge it offered in terms of scientific inquiry. The drive to be exacting and precise with subjects as wildly anomalous as patients is the same that governs her poetry: she engages with the possible precisions of language and fact while appreciating intrinsic imperfections in humans and therefore anything human made. Such a vantage point affords intricate ways of seeing, of investigating how subjective and personal any sensory experience can be. Presented in four partsProspect, Country, Proof, and Studies on Anatomy and MourningProspect offers a vision of life scaled as small as a cell and as large as a country, as bordered and un-bordered as a human body, and heightened by the tensions of all that cannot be known.