FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that Elton Glaser’s new poetry collection, Here and Hereafter, has won the annual Poetry Award from the Ohioana Library Association. Glaser will receive his award at their Ohioana Day Luncheon October 14 in Columbus, Ohio.

The award has a great tradition. Past winners include some of America’s finest poets, including Rita Dove, Mary Oliver, Kenneth Koch, James Wright and John Crowe Ransom.

     

The UA Press is also announcing the publication of two new poetry collections in its distinguished Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer. Elizabeth Hadaway’s Fire Baton (Paperback, $16) is a cross between Irish poet William Butler Yeats and a seasoned moonshiner. A native Appalachian now living in Kingsville, Md., Hadaway writes poems, as noted poet Fred Chappell describes them, like “wit acid and sweet, angry and gentle, tonic and forgiving. Every line shines with the excellence of poetic craft. ... If you think you feel a pinprick, better look again. It may be a bullet hole.” Here are poems about baton twirling, hound dogs, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and NASCAR stars, including one about Dale Earnhardt at Daytona. This is her first book.

     Carole Simmons Oles, a professor of English at California State University at Chico, explores the life of the noted 19^th century sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) in her collection, Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer (Paperback, $16). Noted poet Alice Ostriker finds the book “simultaneously inspiring, informative, fun, solid as marble, sensuous as flesh, tough-minded and downright beautiful. When I started, I couldn’t stop - the force of these poems blew me away.” Oles’s poems fashion an intimate dialogue between Hosmer and herself to reveal the kinship between the two artists. Oles keeps readers moving through Hosmer’s fascinating life and career, with its flashes of delight, anger, mischief and triumph, as well as through Oles’s life and time, speaking imaginatively to young women about many issues, including cutting themselves with razor blades, and to older women about such personal experiences as suffering disfiguring treatments for breast cancer.