We are honored to announce the Spring 2022 recipient of The Host Publications Chapbook Prize Winner: Maryan Nagy Captan's Sixteen Rabbits! Forthcoming March 2022.
Sixteen Rabbits transports us through dream, memory, place and time, by opening portals that exist in the liminal space between two worlds. These meditative journeys spring from a deep nostalgia, and one of the most urgent expressions of longing in Captan’s work is that of the displaced, yearning for home. Through displacement, religious persecution, and trauma, these poems come shimmering forth ‘in full-bodied reverie’ seeking divine wisdom which echoes throughout Sixteen Rabbits like a summons–to see this moment, this place, this life–in all of its enchantment. As Captan writes: ‘reverence, / I am writing with reverence.’
Maryan Nagy Captan is a poet, screenwriter, gardener, and birder living in Austin, TX. She is an alum of The Michener Center for Writers and the Disquiet International Literary Program.
Excerpt from Sixteen Rabbits by Maryan Nagy Captan:
Meditation in Austin, Texas
Dawn came late, the day
single-hued, your body like mine.
I fish a bee from your coffee,
the doves coo past noon. Here,
the sun sits like a hat, and mars
is a placeholder for everything round.
A woodpecker scales a live oak;
a second bee mourns the first. At dusk,
I kiss the straight-lined mouths
of geckos and whisper goodnight,
I love you.