Escape Artist

by Terry Blackhawk

Price 96 pages, $13.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-40-5

Terry Blackhawk's poems, crisp as the first apples of autumn, are tart, knowing, and full of the growth of summer. Poems like these can sustain you. You can read and re-read them, marveling at their construction and arrested by insights you missed the first time which then sneak up on you. Blackhawk's poems make you know, with a touch so light you hardly realize you are being tapped on the shoulder, that you are in the presence of the best poetry: multi-leveled, passionate, varied, thoughtful, intense, and beautiful. Escape Artist always conveys the sense that limits and boundaries free us as they define us. It is a harvest of a book, mature work, and its voice carries the zesty suggestion of more poems to come. --Molly Peacock, 2002 Judge, John Ciardi Prize

A mortal pressure, a dream of escape--Terry Blackhawk is writing for her life in her fine new book of departures and returns, flights and transformations. --Edward Hirsch

What "luck" it is--to borrow Blackhawk's word--to happen on these raptures. Memory and reverie, the solid here and now, the firmament of dreams--she works these spaces with such perfect pitch, such manifest grace. The poems soar. We are blessed by her range, her visions and abundant gifts. --Thomas Lynch

Terry Blackhawk is executive director and founder of InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a writers-in-schools program serving students in Detroit's public schools. She is also the author of Body & Field and the chapbook Trio: Voices From the Myths. A former Detroit high school teacher, she holds a BA from Antioch College and a PhD from Oakland University. Her honors include the Foley Poetry Award from America, a National Endowment for the Humanities Teacher-Scholar Award, the Michigan Governors' Award in Arts Education, and a Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Residence grant. She lives in Detroit with her husband, Evan.