Severance Songs

Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. Severance Songs is a sequence of unrhymed sonnets written in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the Afghanistan/Iraq wars, while Joshua Corey was living in pastoral upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone.