Entre chien et loup — between dog and wolf. This French colloquialism for twilight informs Jennifer Grotz’ s debut poetry collection, Cusp. A winner of this year’ s Bakeless Prize for poetry, Grotz explores the peculiar territory of middleness — neither dark nor light, not quite familiar but not fully unknown. It is a place with its own dangers, its own knowledge: road signs in a French tunnel remind drivers of their headlights in the temporary darkness; a scratchy recording of the last castrato highlights art’ s uneasy coupling of inspiration and artifice. Personal, thoughtful, inquisitive, and introspective, these poems reveal Grotz’ s varied influences, from the “ quilted fields” of west Texas to a jazz club in Paris, from a sexy rodeo rider to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the dizziness of the foreign and the strangeness of what’ s all around that gives Cusp its energy, its vitality, signaling the arrival of a distinctive new voice in American verse.
