Eve Luckring — Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention 2018

Eve Luckring is a recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention for 2018 for her volume The Tender Between (Princeton, N.J.: Ornithopter Press. 96 pages, 5½″ x 8½″. Four-color card covers, perfectbound. ISBN 978-1-942723-05-9. $16.00.).

Commentary from the Panel:

“Eve Luckring’s book, The Tender Between, is tough reading, but those who want to put in the work will find it greatly rewarding. The book opens with the word, becoming. As the only word on the first page followed by a comma, we are introduced to Luckring’s process of:

Becoming,

matching
this black to that black
crow’s caw

“Call me Ishmael,” mother reads to me in utero

Subsequent sections of the book are introduced by an ever expanding text that expresses doubt, that questions the need for a name,

dark sea
surging to the brink
of words
sore to the touch
his name
in my mouth

the process (“Is it a story, or a strategy, . . .”),

bleeding under my skin the American dream
a complaint
or a prayer
    crow,

and whose story is it (is it “they me or we”).

an irreducible fraction of a woman dividing by zero
new moon —
a clean place to lay
a discarded name

As the text proceeds, she invokes Lao-Tzu in the Tao Te Ching: “the same source but different
names . . . .”

a forest forgotten
a river owed
a smiling cow on the label
until trees can be landlords

Throughout, Luckring uses the crow as avatar; follow the crow to navigate Luckring’s way that is not the Way and Luckring’s realm that is full of desire, yet empty of desire to see how Luckring’s fragments become a whole.”

See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.