Girl in a Bear Suit

Winner of the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award

GIRL IN A BEAR SUIT by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the winner of the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award. Contest judge, Christopher Citro had this to say about it: "As I turned each page, it kept happening, another poem, another starling came in to roost next to my heart, adding its small but powerful flutter to the whirling filling me delightfully. I started to feel less afraid that it would stop, that the wonderment would be short-lived, and instead began to trust this book. I began to trust Jen, the poet, who'd created these poems. She knows what she's doing, and what she's doing is making art with every line, with every poem, with the whole journey this book takes you on from start to finish." Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is at work on a series of mixed-media blackout poems, hem, drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of Perugia Press, and she is an associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center. More at jenjabailyblackburn.com.

"Jen Jabaily-Blackburn's GIRL IN A BEAR SUIT effervesces with wit, imagination, and sheer verve. Here are poems that dare to revel in multiplicities, embracing our transformations as ongoing and likely synchronous and flaunting language that finds in restlessness the heart's inherent intelligence. The woman is a bear and the bear is a woman and all are beasts and all are stars in the night sky of this dazzling first book. When the poet writes: "I woke up brilliant in a forest," I believe her and you should too."--Jennifer Chang

Poetry.