BEWILDERED BY ALL THIS BROKEN SKY is Anna Scotti's first book of poems, and is the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize for 2020 (judged by Katharine Coles, author of Wayward, Flight, and Look Both Ways). The poems in this book help us to see the miraculous in the broken, the everyday, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness. Experience Bewildered through its custom multimodal/multimedia experience, and chart a new and variable path through the book.
"I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti's debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love. Suffused with beauty, pulsing with life, these poems invite us to see the ordinary, the broken, as miraculous. Heaven is 'my sisters stalking and hissing like jealous cats, ' 'a leather handbag, creased and cracked and smelling of perfume and cash.' Scotti is a welcoming poet, her lines full of extended family, workmen, strangers, dogs, fish, birds, horses, even a giraffe--all so vivid they seem to exist off the page. Her prose poems are small masterpieces. 'Then Fall Again' travels from the 'gold, crunch, crisp' of fall to "Buds furled tight along the branch," and back around again. Yet, beyond even these pleasures, what opens our hearts is the book's deep seated kindness. In 'T'es Pas Seule', the speaker comforts a car crash victim 'in every language I can muster ... Todo está bien. Tranquille, chÈrie.T'es pas seule. Rest easy, rest easy, you aren't, just yet, alone.'"--Ellen Bass
"I am one of those fortunate people who can say that I have known Anna Scotti's poetry for many years. Hers is a voice that permeates her work with such definition that the reader comes to know the poems as intimate gestures, a circling of truths. It is exhilarating to absorb the energy of this poetry. Bewildered By All This Broken Sky is a living world unto itself--a place in the universe where you will dwell in a consciousness that contains, well...multitudes, including the 'horned-rimmed god of unfinished term papers, ' and people who forage in the city dawn beneath skyscrapers, 'gathering the birds that have crashed the great walls of mirrored windows.' The deft surprises go on and on, and you'll want to read this book forever."--Frank Gaspar
Poetry.
