The poems in Audiation are steeped in the experience of classical music, as a performer, as one who loves a performer, and as a devoted listener. Ripe with sensual detail and informed by wide knowledge, the poems are spirited as well as spiritual. How lovely for a non-musician to watch the musician study a score while flying over Arkansas, in "Pianist in a Window Seat," as "Outside the window, / farmland ticks past in umber, / ivory-lined rectangles, / each box its own story..." Any reader who has sat in the uncomfortable, nosebleed-high cheap ticket row of a concert hall will recognize the sensation described in the sonnet-like "On Hearing Schubert," when the houselights dim, the audience disappears, and "...as I sat on some darkened shore, I watched / the long-delayed but inevitable sun / feel out again the lines of its horizon, / and I found I'd let my sorrows go." Here the concert pianist is understood so deeply that the poems can tell what his or her fingers dream while their owner sleeps. Moving easily between received forms and organic lines, the poems invite us to understand and savor the music.

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                    --Marilyn Nelson, Judge, 2013 Donald Justice Poetry Prize