Kerri Webster, recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers' Award, is author of a previous full-length collection, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), as well as two chapbooks: Psalm Project (2009) and Rowing through Fog (2003). Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006 to 2010, she currently lives and writes in her native Idaho. (Author photo by Catherine Rankovic)
Iowa Poetry Prize
“Kerri Webster’s voice is oracular, new, and legendary, full of land and weather. Grand & Arsenal rains forth like a liniment, painting the bald-faced human. Her penchant for opposites reminds us that difference is not a contrary thing but first cousin to who we are. When we read this new luminous voice we are led Upriver. This is Big poetry, a very special book where ‘the gods come down to the banks to drink.’”
—Nikky Finney
“Grand & Arsenal offers up cabinets of curiosities: poems that gather unusual objects, places, remembered bodies—each weathered, handled roughly or gently, and as a result, replete with meaning, hot under the lights of Webster’s attention. The poems play chords on these kunsts, making mosaic landscapes of days or places—or emotions, which all of space is soaking in, if you think about it. This poetry is dark, tender, rather bitter, but I want to linger; it’s sequin-gorgeous in here.”
—Catherine Wagner
University of Iowa Press
