Prayer Book of the Anxious, by Josephine Yu

ISBN: 978-1-932-41858-3
$17

Winner of the 15th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Contest judge, Sarah Kennedy, says: "These are smart, savvy poems, but they are also humane in the best sense of that word: interested in the human and compassionate to all beings. Josephine Yu asks the right questions—'What animal am I?' and 'Ready to go home?'—and the answers she gives are always those of an anxiety-born attention, not just to the self but to all of humanity. At the end of PRAYER BOOK OF THE ANXIOUS, our answer has to be yes, but in this ultimately outward-looking book, home is the world in which we all, nervously, exist."

Josephine Yu earned an MFA from Georgia State University and a PhD from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, and Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. She won the Ploughshares 2013 Emerging Writers Contest and has been honored with Meridian's 2010 Editor's Prize, the New Letters 2010 Poetry Award, and the New Letters 2010-2011 Readers Award for Poetry. She lives with her husband in Tallahassee, Florida.