Winner of the 2011 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

Edward Hirsch, Judge

“I’m moved by the way that Carolyn Creedon’s work treats experience as sacred. She won’t look away from difficult truths. She writes frankly about her own frustrations, longings, and heartbreaks, but she also recognizes the suffering of others—their secret grievances and griefs. The daily working world is here in full measure. And yet there’s an oddly religious feeling that keeps breaking through this volume, which cherishes the small things, the lesser divinities, and ends with a prayer. It heartens me to welcome this fiery and fervent book, this wet collection, into the world.”

—Edward Hirsch, Judge

“I have long admired Carolyn Creedon’s work. Her first book is strong and vital. She is not like anyone else now publishing in our country. Her directness and immediacy make her a kind of legitimate granddaughter of the sublime Walt Whitman. ”

—Harold Bloom

“Gleaming wet with all the fluids of life—the ‘high sweet sacrament that stank of blood and wine’—these astonishing poems defy us to separate the sacred from the profane, myths from the mundane, intellect from appetite. Language itself moves with a fluid energy, a breathtaking emotional velocity and formal dexterity, hot-wired by humor, fueled by hunger, cadence after cadence, as Creedon piles on the similes till the whole world wears her kind of trouble, her wild and brilliant apprehension.”

—Eleanor Wilner

“Carolyn Creedon’s first book is a red-hot blast of truth. Her wildly various poems are carefully cooked yet manage to be slyly and earnestly raw. ‘I am the spilled-out impure grit, and the laundress of it,’ says the speaker in ‘Stone.’ Ever ballsy, Wet is also imbued with huge stabs of longing and precipitous tenderness. Whether in leaks or spurts or cataracts, this astonishing new voice holds nothing back.”

—Ellen Doré Watson