Uttermost Paradise Place

the long version

Winner of the 2009 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Laura McKee’s *Uttermost Paradise Place* achieves a shimmering transparency and surreal potency. While many of the poems are perceived via a persona, it is ultimately the personae of perception that proscribe the pure pleasure of reading. Committed to the eye and the ear, Uttermost Paradise Place sounds a music of syllables, repetitions, recurrences, and duration. As judge Claudia Keelan writes in her introduction, “Laura McKee creates a poetics of call and response, but not in the traditional sense, as in poet to reader, chorus leader to singers, etc. These poems call to each other, syllable by syllable, and they are so pleased with their circuitry of sound and sense that readers — if they just give themselves away to the pleasure of being exactly nowhere but in the unscripted place all authentic poetry provides — will experience the paradise the book proposes.”