Hilda Raz: A Celebration

In July of 2008 Hilda Raz called to tell me that I'd won the 2009 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. I remember saying "really?" several times and giggling uncontrollably. At first, she seemed concerned. Was I stable? Then, with the wisdom of someone who's been in this business for a long time, she asked, "Is this your first book?" "Yes!" I exclaimed, "yes!" "Oh," she replied, relieved, "then a big congratulations is in order." In the phone calls and e-mails that followed, I realized how insanely lucky I was to have an editor like Hilda, whose skill and candor helped to shape and polish the poems in Taste of Cherry. Hilda had a way of articulating—with uncanny precision—the creative and organizational decisions I'd made based on intuition. "Yes, an ars poetica is absolutely necessary at this point in the manuscript," she declared about "Egypt Journal: The Poet's Condition." No concerns were too finite, either. Together, we relineated "Last Happiness," the final poem in the book, working to capture the natural anxiety and momentum of the language. At one point, Hilda gently vetoed my proposed revision to the poem's final lines: "as if pleasure were the one brief, brutal, / impersonal thing in the world." "No," she said when I mentioned that I wanted to change "pleasure" to "desire." Desire, she explained, implies intentionality, while pleasure connotes pure experience. "Taste of Cherry is instinctual and subversive. You have to own that," she said emphatically. How right she was and still is!

Let's say that the typical velocity of getting to know someone is about thirty-five miles per hour. Hilda and I operated at a solid sixty-five miles per hour. In between our conversations about Taste of Cherry, we discovered a mutual love of French feminist theory, and delved into our personal histories, too. I told her about my smothering, othering experiences growing up as an only child in a large extended Italian American family. With a combination of Judith Butleresque discourse and fierce motherly love, Hilda described the book she'd written about her son's sex-change operation. I think I learned as much from these conversations as I did from our writer/editor discussions.

It's often said that annual book prizes settle into a signature, predictable aesthetic. This past February, when I visited the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a PS book prize winner symposium, I got a real sense of the dazzlingly diverse family of writers that I'd joined. Listening to Mari L'Esperance read from her quiet, imagistically brilliant collection, The Darkened Temple, and Anne Finger read her bold, wonderfully absurd story, "The Blind Marksman," I realized that Hilda Raz's greatest gift to her authors and readers is a passion for writing, which runs deeper than any personal proclivity or formula. That night at dinner, Hilda affectionately referred to me as the "youngest prize winner." "I'm thirty!" I exclaimed, slightly dismayed, which made her throw back her head and let out an amazing laugh.