Winner of the 2010 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Queen’s Gold Medal winner James Fenton.

Mark Kraushaar’s new collection represents a tentative, awkward, often funny though frequently heart-breaking struggle to find a path to meaning in the world.

“A repertoire of good stories, and something of the visionary.”
Marilyn Nelson

“Generally triggered by something as deceptively simple as a small newspaper item, an overheard remark, or an incident observed in a bus station, Mark Kraushaar’s meditative/narrative poems illuminate moments of surreal reality by telling little stories of heartbreakingly human intent.”
Peter Stitt, The Gettysburg Review

Mark Kraushaar was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up outside Boston in Concord, Massachusetts. He has worked as a high school English teacher, a taxi driver and a shipyard welder on the Mississippi. He then moved to Wisconsin, where he has worked as a nurse since the mid-1980s. His poems are widely published and have been anthologised in Best American Poetry (2006) and Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman (2003). His debut collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, was published by University of Wisconsin Press (2009) as winner of the Felix Pollak Prize, and was also a finalist for the May Swenson Prize, the Juniper Prize and the Walt Whitman Award.