Poet Anna Scotti's collection, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, is the winner of the inaugural Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2020. The poems in this book help us to see the miraculous in the broken, the everyday, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness. Poems from this stunning collection have recently appeared in The New Yorker and Yemassee, and have won the Pocataligo Prize for poetry (selected by Nikky Finney) and the Marc Fischer Prize for poetry (selected by Chris Ransick). Ellen Bass says, of Bewildered: "I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti's debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love. Heaven is "my sisters stalking and hissing like jealous cats," "a leather handbag, creased and cracked and smelling of perfume and cash."
Scotti is a welcoming poet, her lines full of extended family, workmen, strangers, dogs, fish, birds, horses, even a giraffe—all so vivid they seem to exist off the page. Her prose poems are small masterpieces. "Then Fall Again" travels from the "gold, crunch, crisp" of fall to "Buds furled tight along the branch," and back around again. Yet, beyond even these pleasures, what opens our hearts is the book's deep seated kindness. In "T'es Pas Seule", the speaker comforts a car crash victim "in every language I can muster...Todo está bien. Tranquille, chérie.T'es pas seule. Rest easy, rest easy, you aren't, just yet, alone." Frank Gaspar says: "I am one of those fortunate people who can say that I have known Anna Scotti's poetry for many years. Hers is a voice that permeates her work with such definition that the reader comes to know the poems as intimate gestures, a circling of truths. It is exhilarating to absorb the energy of this poetry. Bewildered By All This Broken Sky is a living world unto itself—a place in the universe where you will dwell in a consciousness that contains, well...multitudes, including the "horned-rimmed god of unfinished term papers," and people who forage in the city dawn beneath skyscrapers, "gathering the birds that have crashed the great walls of mirrored windows." The deft surprises go on and on, and you'll want to read this book forever."
Anna Scotti's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker since 2016, and has been awarded a number of prizes and honors. Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, her first collection of poems, was awarded the inaugural Lightscatter Press Prize, and was selected by Katherine Coles. Her short stories are regulars in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and elsewhere. Anna's novella, BIG and BAD, is available everywhere now. See home page for links to purchase. A former journalist, Anna has written for national and regional magazines including InStyle, People, The Los Angeles Times Traveling in Style, Bon Appetit, Los Angeles, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, YM, and Sugar. She was a foreign correspondent for WhoWeekly (Australia) and a columnist for the late, great Buzz: The Talk of Los Angeles.
"Imagine dangling your feet in a cold stream after a strenuous hike in the sun. You're relaxed and happy, but the day is clouded by loss because it's the anniversary of something terrible you suffered long ago. As you sigh into a light breeze, you have a long-awaited insight into your past experience. That scenario approximates the physical and mental space of Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, Anna Scotti's debut collection of poems. 'How odd, to find myself the villain, and never know until this moment. I'll admit I was a barefoot slattern of a mother; I'll admit I should have kept that fat hand tucked tight within my own,' she writes in 'Now That I Have Known Loss,' one of the book's many prose poems. Scotti's approach is sweet yet dark, accessible yet achingly strange. She gets at motherhood's complexities, like how you can never truly know your children, even as you know them better than anyone else ever will. And she elucidates the particular love that parents know and that other adults cannot. But instead of shutting such readers out or preaching about parenthood as a higher calling, she presents it as a sad and lovely curse you take on willingly. 'Last night you came to me, barefoot,/nightgown damp and twisted with sleep,/and said you'd lost a thing with four rooms/and no doors,' she writes in 'Feathers of Gold,' about a child's nightmare. 'That's easy, I said. Your heart.'" - Jennifer Levin
"I imagine Anna Scotti observing from within a snow globe without the snow but with 'the sun…beating glitter from the sidewalk, scattering diamonds in our path.' She steps outside of a moment, anoints it with clarity, and builds a lifetime into just one poem. Scotti's attentiveness encourages the reader to commit to a vigilant eye. The precision and complexity of the poems urge me to read again and again. Otherwise, I fear I may miss something: a number in the combination lock of Bewildered By All This Broken Sky. Lines that repeat throughout the collection give the reader a more holistic understanding each time: 'soul of the bear,' or 'that thing you did.' But the most powerful anaphora in this collection is the repetition of loss as hauntingly familiar as the Jaws soundtrack. Immediately evident is the vulnerability of the mother in her relationship to her child and the way her heart is a constant casualty to time. Loss dapples the mother's experience. By the time a moment registers, it is already a memory. In 'Nine,' the speaker comments while watching their daughter, 'It's almost lost, this ability to be lost / in soil, water, leaves, and folded flower petals.' Scotti consistently anchors the reader in the ethereal qualities of love and loss through concrete images, thereby giving language to the ineffable. This poet suspends us in the past, the future, and the present—ever aware of the loss that living demands, yet somehow makes it not just palatable, but desirable." - Angela Dribben
"Poet Ellen Bass describes Scotti's poems as '[work that] helps us to see the miraculous in the broken, the every day, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness.' ... I was struck by the feeling of goodbye in these readings: forget-me-nots and loved ones passed, the bitter sting of a partner changed, blame and doubt and anxiety and guilt. These poems are ghosts or whispers of memory. And yet it is magic in glimpses, the sound of laughter and tinkling bells. We feel support in shared sadness. Anna Scotti's language comforts us that we are not isolated against the cruel beauty of this maddening world. So, like pieces of stained glass, the characters in this collection come together to make up all this broken sky, and you—the reader—are solidified somewhere between it. Scotti features images of the mundane and everyday passing members of society but she reminds us that they each have their own story. These poems are vulnerable at their core while still striking universality. These poems are for neighbors, for strangers, for anyone who wants to see their experience reflected in someone else. I recommend Bewildered by All This Broken Sky to anyone who needs to laugh, to cry, or to dream." - Sierra Thoemmes
"I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti's debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love. Suffused with beauty, pulsing with life, these poems invite us to see the ordinary, the broken, as miraculous. Heaven is 'my sisters stalking and hissing like jealous cats,'' a leather handbag, creased and cracked and smelling of perfume and cash.' Scotti is a welcoming poet, her lines full of extended family, workmen, strangers, dogs, fish, birds, horses, even a giraffe—all so vivid they seem to exist off the page. Her prose poems are small masterpieces. 'Then Fall Again' travels from the 'gold, crunch, crisp' of fall to 'Buds furled tight along the branch,' and back around again. Yet, beyond even these pleasures, what opens our hearts is the book's deep seated kindness. In 'T'es Pas Seule,'the speaker comforts a car crash victim 'in every language I can muster...Todo está bien. Tranquille, chérie. T'es pas seule. Rest easy, rest easy, you aren't, just yet, alone.'" - Ellen Bass
"I am one of those fortunate people who can say that I have known Anna Scotti's poetry for many years. Hers is a voice that permeates her work with such definition that the reader comes to know the poems as intimate gestures, a circling of truths. It is exhilarating to absorb the energy of this poetry. Bewildered By All This Broken Sky is a living world unto itself—a place in the universe where you will dwell in a consciousness that contains, well...multitudes, including the 'horned-rimmed god of unfinished term papers,' and people who forage in the city dawn beneath skyscrapers, 'gathering the birds that have crashed the great walls of mirrored windows.' The deft surprises go on and on, and you'll want to read this book forever." - Frank X. Gaspar
