Mike White’s Addendum to a Miracle, which won the 12th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, was one of three finalists for the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry. The judges’ citation for his collection reads as follows: The poems in Mike White’s Addendum to a Miracle explore complex notions of fatherhood, patriarchy, violence, and self with an understated yet sharp gaze. That gaze delineates thresholds of dark and light — the body pressing its “weight/ against the big revolving door,/tumbling into the sunny afternoon,/mildly stunned that it’s there.” Several of White’s poems are haikus or similar in their spareness that hides what is unspoken. The words create silhouettes on a page and lines range from ethereal to corporeal, from “in the shadows/of the ferris wheel/bright hints of deer” to “my son insists/I am a father/and he is a brown bear./It goes this way./He gets hungry/and by and by/I am chosen.” The poems’ images often rest on the cusp of invisibility and apparition. The endings of the poems are not static, but instead leave the reader at the entrance of an open door. Yet what do final lines open into? Both the existentialism of “white space” (a pun?) and “God’s/good eye/waiting out the rain.” These images that seem opposite give keys to reading the poems–presence and absence coinciding on a tightrope. For more information about the award, please go to 15 Bytes Award for Poetry

The awards ceremony, at which Mr White, his fellow finalist, and the eventual winner, will read from their collections, will be held at 19:00 on October 17th 2018 at The Printed Garden, 9445 S Union Sq, Ste A, Sandy, Utah 84070. Full details of the event can be found by going to The Printed Garden