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Smaller Than Death, by Theodore Worozbyt 

Worozbyt's book Smaller Than Death won the 2015 Knut House Poetry Prize and features original artwork by painter Cheryl McClure. Image magazine compares Worozbyt to "a Zen archer, as skillful as he is serene. In language precise and apparently effortless, at once conversational and elegant, his poems offer meditative exercises that ebb and flow with an organic rhythm, by turns placid and stormy. Worozbyt is a master of mood. Line by line, stillness deepens, or a sense of threat builds. He writes of family, place, season, of lives lived between two cultures, and with an ear for the beauties manifest in the idiomatic rhythms of common speech. He possesses a keen, unsentimental sense of the past, documenting both its ugliness and its beauty with deftness and care. With respect to the dead, his poems sometimes approach magic realism in their literal sense of a world beyond—or you could call it faith."






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Author Bio

Recipient of grants from the NEA and the Alabama and Georgia Arts councils, Worozbyt holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in literature from the University of Alabama. He is currently an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College. His first collection The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press) won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second book Letters of Transit (University of Massachusetts Press) won the 2007 Juniper Prize. His work has appeared in Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, and others. Smaller Than Death won the 2015 Knut House Poetry Prize.







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Artist Bio

Cheryl McClure was born in Oklahoma and lives on a small ranch in northern Texas. McClure was a finalist for the prestigious Hunting Art Prize in 2011, and an artist in residence at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Sainte Colombe sur lâ Hers, France, in 2006. Her work is represented in five galleries across the United States, including Houston, Nashville, and Seattle. Her paintings are exhibited in public collections throughout Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, and Tokyo, Japan.

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Advance Praise for Worozbyt's Smaller Than Death

Like a Zen archer, poet Theodore Worozbyt is as skillful as he is serene. In language precise and apparently effortless, at once conversational and elegant, his poems offer meditative exercises that ebb and flow with an organic rhythm, by turns placid and stormy. Worozbyt is a master of mood. Line by line, stillness deepens, or a sense of threat builds. He writes of family, place, season, of lives lived between two cultures, and with an ear for the beauties manifest in the idiomatic rhythms of common speech. He possesses a keen, unsentimental sense of the past, documenting both its ugliness and its beauty with deftness and care. With respect to the dead, his poems sometimes approach magic realism in their literal sense of a world beyond—or you could call it faith.

— "Artist of the Month" in Image, Issue 50




Sample pages from Smaller Than Death




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Smaller Than Death, pp 40-41



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Smaller Than Death, pp 120-21





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Smaller Than Death, pp 44-45



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Smaller Than Death, pp 84-85





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