Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa Poetry Prize)

In Aggregate of Disturbances, Michele Glazer confronts the slipperiness of language and perception as she probes natural processes—the lives of insects, the uncertainty of love, and the deaths of human beings. Nature’s beauty interests Glazer less than the fact that it is chaotic, amoral, redundant, charming, and indifferent to human concern—qualities that are, in these poems, turned into another kind of beauty. "The stalk was knocked flat & the allium’s great lavender sphere / kissed the dirt & in the aftermath the pendulous blossomed / tip bobbed like a wand madly attempting to enchant-enchant-enchant. // I wanted to believe that it happened to amuse me."

These taut lyrical poems negotiate between desire for something irrefutable and an uneasy bedrock of paradox. In the interstices, Aggregate of Disturbances breaks open language and experience to offer a glimpse of "the eye on the other side."