Winner Helen Kay Chapbook Prize Penelope in Repose is that rare poetic feat: a series of poems which make a successful whole, a story complete and real and powerful. These poems choose the inside, to use a cliché. But these poems are never merely that: the subject, Penelope, is indeed family to the writer, someone he’s met, admired late in her life, and who now deserves, in her final absence, someone to carry on in that voice. The work is moving, dramatic, and striking in its imagery. –Robert Parham, author of The Relentlessness of Salvation

“Lucia weaves [her father’s] story into her own through poetry that is brutally honest while being ‘bathed in the light’ of forgiveness . . . with a glance, a gesture, an image that glows vividly on the page.” —Linda Back McKay, author of The Next Best Thing and Out of the Shadows: Stories of Adoption and Reunion “ . . . the tragic and amazing story of her father’s survival in Nazi- occupied Poland . . . comes wonderfully alive in all its mesmerizing detail. These memories will dance in our minds for a long time.” —Mary Logue, author of Hand Work and Trees “Miss May escaped the quicksand of her father’s cruelty through art, music and literature. She writes exquisite poetry that shines light in the darkness.” —Robert O. Fisch, author of Light from the Yellow Star: A Lesson of Love from the Holocaust and The Sky Is Not the Limit “ . . . we see how the lucky and the unlucky in this single family lose or find their strength . . .This collection is blunt in its truth telling, and ambitious in its range. I won’t forget these poems.” —Deborah Keenan, author of From Tiger to Prayer and so she had the world Lucia Piaskowiak May writes without any sentimentality whatsoever about her father's life in World War II Poland and about the shadow he cast over her own life. She compresses enormous emotion into tense spare lines to create poetry that is fierce and true. —Keith Maillard, author of The Clarinet Polka