Interiors Winner of the 2021 Open Chapbook Competition

Enter if you dare, and enter you must into these enchanted, exquisite interiors, these wonder cabinets jam-packed with all the beautiful and necessary stuff: mystery, reverie, pleasure, and wisdom. Here we find an anonymous mermaid composing sea-salted epics and the biblical Jonah now a best-selling celebrity lost in the belly of a vacuum-cleaner. In poems that welcome us into the immensity of tiny galaxies, we are invited to nest and make mischief in party cakes, tornadoes, eggshells, kaleidoscopes, and fortune cookies. Maura Stanton, with a miniaturist's eye for detail and the agility of a master illusionist reveals the opulent and miraculous worlds thriving within the cracks, crevices, matchboxes, bedsprings, and trick closets of our imaginations. The poems summon us to sympathize with and to acknowledge the trapped, the endangered, and the disappeared in our lives and in our imaginations. And most poignantly to rethink the ways in which we think about the utilitarian in our day-to-day and in our dreams. These gorgeous and sumptuous poems all at once delight and serve as cautionary tales or fables to remind us that we ignore the seemingly insignificant at our peril and urge us to appreciate the extraordinary miracles in the ordinary objects that bless and inhabit our everyday lives.

-Catherine Bowman

What a delight to read these prose poems by Maura Stanton! Each poem is a treasure box of words where whimsy turns into wonder. Our "interiors" are the repositories for our hopes, dreams, ambitions, and fears-and Maura Stanton's Interiors shows us all those emotions and so much more. What dwells within isn't always what we think it is-and this book delves into all the nooks and crannies and couched versions of self and selves in a haunting yet highly accessible fashion. Interiors is allegory with style, delivered in deftly metaphorical poems that hit right where we live-those interiors that haunt us all, yet keep us going. I am grateful for the sharp wit and wise heart of Maura Stanton, and you will be too.

-Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of Barefaced Woman

In his classic THE PROSE POEM, Michael Benedikt noted the form's "visionary thrust", and Robert Bly elsewhere pointed out how it contained "all sorts of fantastic details." Yes, and the prose-poem is the Trickster of literature, wisdom and comedy cohabiting and cavorting; you never know what will happen next. I love this book, this shimmering magic box, this cave of wonders, amazingly inventive, surprises in every phrase. Place and time are no obstacle, but rather are invitations to invent, now inside a bottle, a bubble, now inside a whale, the Trojan horse or a fortune cookie. A totally new world is revealed via "le merveilleux". What discoveries, what exciting adventures as we're bounded in a nutshell and count ourselves kings (and queens) of infinite space! I love this beautifully written collection, the finest I've seen in many a year.

-Brian Swann, Professor of Humanities, The Cooper Union