Winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

The poems in Eye of Water are derived from the narrator’s experiences in what she calls her “waking.”  She traces inspiration to “the beginning of myth, to Eve in the Garden of Eden” and states: “We could spend our lives unraveling the mistake and discover that life was one great big ‘chore,’ and inescapable. And the path is full of missteps and accidents because we cannot (or prefer not to) remember all that got us to that moment.  My body seems to be a symptom of the past, so no matter who touches me, all the ghosts are waiting there. The ‘chore’ becomes how to survive despite the flaws of our humanness that makes us brutal at times.”

Amber Flora Thomas is the winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, and the Relia Lossy Poetry Award.  She has an MFA in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis.