Winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, selected by Ariana Reines

Berry's Ampersand Revisited is a lurid, lyrical trio of open prose poems marking up the blueprint of familial myth-making.

“Ampersand Revisited is an inverted Odyssey, etched in searing—downright entomological—precision, tracking a father’s retreat from occultism through the wounded meshwork of the son’s very grammar. Magical powers—ancient craftiness—might make the epic hero, but they are an impossible burden to live with in the Manichean, and very American, riddle that forges Ampersand’s poeisis. Crossed & re-crossed with sex & suicide, school & mystery school, the book is the vivid, laconic gloss of the ravages of mystical knowing.”

—Ariana Reines

(from the judge's 2013 National Poetry Series citation)