Melissa Kwasny's Reading Novalis in Montana picked by Huffington Post as one of 10 top books of 2009!

Melissa Kwasny's Reading Novalis in Montana picked by Huffington Post as one of 10 top books of 2009!

One of Montana's preeminent poets, Melissa Kwasny, has achieved long overdue renown with the selection of her latest poetry collection, Reading Novalis in Montana, as one of the 10 top books of 2009. Making the selection was the Huffington Post's Anis Shivani. Here is Shivani's citation for Melissa's book:

Melissa Kwasny, Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed). Much of the innovative poetry written in America is published not by the big houses, but by independent presses like Milkweed, and its many smaller siblings. Too often, our poetry is obscure, willfully ignorant of realities beyond the immediate self, and pathetic in its complaint, narcissism, and soullessness. Moreover, the language tends to be prosaic, when it's not self-consciously experimental. Kwasny falls into none of these traps; she writes romantic-environmental poetry of a high order, communing with nature in a language that never sells itself short. Can we imagine ourselves, gluttonous twenty-first century Americans, in a better relationship with nature? Can we see ourselves beyond artificial separations between the animate and the inanimate, between the sensate and the inert? Kwasny shows how, as she refuses to back down under the pressure of material degradation.

Melissa appears alongside other such notable writers as Nobel-prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Dave Eggers, Ha Jin, and another Montanan, Walter Kirn. Melissa is, by the way, the only woman among the top 10 and the only poet.

To see the entire list, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/huffington-post-bloggers...