WINNER OF THE 2022 LAURIA/FRASCA POETRY PRIZE
Sicilianas, an admirable work of imagination, creates a space where we-like the characters in its poems-live uneasily. It's a space of myth and nightmare, where ghosts are more vivid than the living, the dreamed more important than the lived. Over and over, in these evocations of twentieth-century Sicilian immigrants and their descendants, facts yield to emotional truths. Women dominate these stories: their bravery, their fears, their transcendence, their legacy. The astute mingles with the sensory, the complex thought with the heartrending cry. Manizza Roszak has an exquisite lyricism, an ear for the music and tension of the line, which gives her poems the power to render "the lives / of the loved played over / for us as they might / have been."-Kathleen Ossip, distinguished judge

Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Raised in rural Connecticut, Suzanne received her MFA from UC Irvine and spent several years as an adjunct lecturer at Los Angeles-area colleges and universities before moving with her family to Groningen. Her creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, The Journal, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Room, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a reader for CutBank and as an editorial assistant for Seneca Review.