In No One’s Land

Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Selected for the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by D.A. Powell

“In No One’s Land stakes a claim on wilderness and, most assuredly, manages to homestead there. These are not the poems born of quiet contemplation; they are edgy and lurid, painfully administering to the world of convenience stores, diners, one-night stands. ‘I locked up all of the beautiful things that might move me,’ says Paige Ackerson-Kiely, daring to pick at the raw skin of being and to call it beauty: ‘I am saying God, if you are anywhere, let you be an arctic night.’ From the starkness of glaciers to the empty refrigerator, these poems rise from the most barren landscapes and manage to make of them fabled islands, joyful joyful things.”—D.A. Powell, judge of the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

“It is a rare and welcome thing to encounter a collection which possesses such authority, such an unassuming combination of inevitability and strangeness. It is rarer still to find these qualities in a first book. Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s haunted and compelling poems are terse but expansive, and fierce in their disdain of posturing or trivia. In No One’s Land introduces us to a poet of genuine originality—and immense talent.” —David Wojahn

“The poems of this collection show remarkable range—they are at once clean and headlong; driven by music (‘Deer at the roadside, deer in the meadow, / tall grass, headlight. Broken, bro. ken…’); and driven by imaginative narrative gesture (‘It is late and the waitress is shining cutlery, folding cloth squares into neat little tents a boy who is small for his age might imagine sleeping under.’). We are surprised as we continue reading. As we should be. In this book, we find straightforward syntax and syntax slightly skewed—and the poems are, whether spare or thick on the page, clear, accessible, realized. Paige Ackerson-Kiely has written a wonderfully cohesive and exciting collection—exciting for its reach and mature and masterful handling of material—and exciting, too, for its promise of what will come.” —Martha Rhodes