Wespress x Shapiro presents Rachel Trousdale

Wesleyan University McKelvey Room,  Admissions Building (70 Wyllys), Middletown, CT

Please join us for an elegant reception and champagne toast to celebrate Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by Rachel Trousdale—winner of Wesleyan University Press’s inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize. Sponsored by Wesleyan University Press, the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, and the Wesleyan English Department.

Special guests include Inaugural Judge Robert Pinsky and co-editors Professor John Murillo and Oliver Egger (’23), Assistant Editor at Wesleyan University Press.

Praise for Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem
“A rare gift in art is directness: to turn a clear, unsentimental gaze on love and grief in all their variations, with no smokey or mysterioso evasions. Almost as valuable is meaningful surprise, the stunned laughter of recognition even if the subject for marvel is loss. The heartfelt, unpredictable poems of Rachel Trousdale attain that kind of discovery.”
—Robert Pinsky, Judge, 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize

“You can’t literally make modern poems with a laser, nor comedy with a magnifying glass, but if you could and you got it all just right—accurate, even-tempered, and delighted by life’s bizarre turns—you’d get something like this wise, sharp-witted and generally exceptional debut, by a poet who knows what to do when you fall in love as well as what to do when the world spins fast enough to throw you sideways and you have to hold on, for your kids, to your kids. How is a baby like ‘a brood of termites?’ ‘What have we taught our son?’ ‘Where are our robot sharks?’ What if a yeti visited a mature, equable, family-friendly Auden? If any poem, any life, amounts (as the poet says) to ‘an incomplete experiment,’ this one’s got lovely results, a thesis, an antithesis, and six kinds of love: filial, amorous, amicable, intellectual, maternal, and one that remains as an exercise for the reader. ‘I Swear This Is Not Intended as a Back-Handed Compliment,’ one poem declares, and neither is this self-conscious sentence: you can trust these technically gifted sonnets, prose poems, sestinas, poesie concrète, punchlines and acrobatic sentences to take you anywhere, and then (as the poet also says) to bring us home.”
—Stephanie Burt, author of We are Mermaids and Don’t Read Poetry

About the Cardinal Poetry Prize
Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by Rachel Trousdale was selected by guest judge Robert Pinsky from fifteen finalists, following an initial screening process of 428 manuscripts. The initial screening was conducted by coeditors John Murillo, poet and [Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University]; Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor-in-Chief of Wesleyan University Press; and Oliver Egger, Assistant Editor at Wesleyan
University Press.

The Cardinal Poetry Prize is open biennially to poets aged 40 or older who have never published a poetry book or have not published a new original poetry collection within the
last 10 years. The winner receives $1,000 cash prize and has their manuscript published in the acclaimed Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series.

About Rachel Trousdale
Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have
appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, Diagram, and other journals, as well as a chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone (Fishing Line Press, 2015). Her scholarly work includes Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (Macmillan, 2010). Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is her first full-length collection of poetry.