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Open Books: Events
March 30, 2010 07:30 PM
NICK LANTZ
Nick Lantz won two significant awards, the 2010 Felix Pollak Prize and the 2009 Breadloaf Conference Bakeless Prize, and so he arrives with a newly published book in each hand. The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House ($14.95 Wisconsin) and We Don't Know We Don't Know ($15 Graywolf) each feature his crackling combination of intelligence and poetic skill. Lantz trains his nigh unto boundless imagination and deep empathy on a wide array of subjects, from family to contemporary culture to politics, current and historic. The title We Don't Know We Don't Know comes from the ever confounding Donald Rumsfeld, who shares epigraphic duty in that book with Pliny the Elder. Likely what earned Lantz the prizes, and will earn him more acclaim, is the compassion he expresses for us animals and our often difficult lives. His poem "Love Letter From Inside the Titan Missile Museum" (from Lightning) ends, "We / know little more than when we first peered down the well of the silo -- it was so / brightly lit, we saw everything, every tube, panel, girder, and button. But we could / not see the bottom. There was no bottom to see, / though the two of us / looked and looked."
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