Laura Budofsky Wisniewski’s Sanctuary, Vermont, is the winner of the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize.
About Sanctuary, Vermont
Here, past, present, and future residents of Sanctuary, a richly imagined Vermont town, are given voice. Laura Budofsky Wisniewski joins the lineage of Edgar Lee Masters, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Louise Glück in inhabiting and valorizing the extraordinary inner lives of everyday people. Sanctuary’s townspeople endure hardships and loneliness, suffer injustice and racism, but still find moments of solace, beauty, and communion.
“Beware the soothing stories of history, that a town named Sanctuary in a Vermont known for bucolic, liberal values has no stories of systemic inequity and violence: ‘My mother used to say / If you are ever drowning, raise your eyes; / a rich man will be watching.’ This is a book of lost voices, of selfless persona poems shot through with a lyric control so unfaltering it seems Laura Budofsky Wisniewski has written an impossible book. What a rarity, what a necessity for the oppressed not to be generalized but to speak with intricately subtle minds: ‘The Overseer says / I am nothing. / But once my mother danced / and I danced with her,’ a young girl says. When Wisniewski illuminates one person, all of humanity suddenly brightens. This is an unbelievable, moving book that knows, in the end, the only true sanctuary is the one we make of our lives, and our language, for each other.”
—Katie Ford, judge of The 2020 Orison Poetry Prize
Go to https://bit.ly/3zeZra6 for more information about Laura and Sanctuary, Vermont and to order.