WHITE PINE PRESS

White Pine Press is pleased to announce that Emily Schulten has been awarded the Twenty-Ninth Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript, Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia.

The Judge, Marc Vincenz, says of Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia:  “You can feel the ocean surf eating away the shores of Emily Schulten’s over-traversed island. ‘When space and silence [once] existed ... .’ The land is being swallowed not only by the tide but by the ever-increasing waves of tourists, by big money, and by a distorted historical narrative. Earnest and hard-won, Emily Schulten’s Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia traverses the few spaces still unpopulated to find the semblance of an affirmation of self. Only (this) much is remaindered in the memory—much of which, itself, is to be questioned. Memory and history have become a blur: ‘This is how a place becomes a postcard ... a folklore of half-truths.’ There is loneliness, longing, love, and an attempt to find the self within this last dot of land in an ever-expanding ocean. Is memory simply the residue of embellished folklore? And which of these are other versions of the poet herself ? ‘[Even] the word moves on the page / so that content never remains the same.’ Desperately heart-felt, brave, a worthy companion on any island.”