Weapons Grade

Terese Svoboda is the author of ten books of prose and poetry, most recently Black Glasses Like Clark Kent that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her honors in poetry include the Iowa Poetry Prize and two prizes from the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Medwick Award, and Cecil Hemley Award. She has also won an O. Henry Prize for the short story, the Bobst Prize for fiction, a Pushcart Prize for an essay, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in translation. Her opera WET premiered at Los Angeles Disney Hall in 2005. Svoboda lives in New York City.

Svoboda has such range - of subject, of emotion (from whimsical play to chillingly dead serious) - that these poems take you on a wild ride, fast and dangerous, but always in control. This is a goddamn terrific book! - Thomas Lux, author of God Particles ""Weapons Grade is both whistleblower and elegy, a tour de force in the expansive in-your-face tradition of Susan Griffin and Garry Trudeau. Svoboda is an indefatigably American writer of conscience and acuity - a documentarian and saboteur, satirist and sharp-tongued citizen, her poems dangerous and heartbreaking."" - Maureen Seaton, author of Venus Examines Her Breast ""'Let the continent flex its bicep, / a man built on steroids.' This is Terese Svoboda's grave view of America today, in her new collection Weapons Grade (the name of a grisly atrocity game), but she makes poems that laugh anyway!... Sweet - or sharp - tempered comedy empowers Svoboda to address the direst subjects in a prophetic and scary book full of hilarious noises."" - Caroline Knox, author of Quaker Guns