In this, the fourth volume to win the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Lisa Zeidner’s twenty-two poems introduce a surprising range of characters, from a cryogenically preserved caveman to a 78-year-old widow arrested for shoplifting. Some of the narratives collected here are unusually long (like “Dementia Colander,” a mock-epic about the history of an unnamed nation whose king suffers a rare disease). These poems attempt to offer not just poetic moments, glimpses of joy or loss, but a sense of self in time and history—whole lives in all of their busy-ness and disorder. Lisa Zeidner’s dark wit considers any subject, from the Holocaust to child abuse, a subject for intellectual playfulness and emotional discovery.
    Despite the range of subjects, the poems in Pocket Sundial are bound by a concern for time, for how we think about time. These are poems about memory, foresight, anticipation, regret—all of chronology’s complexities.

Lisa Zeidner is associate professor of English at Rutgers University in Camden, where she teaches writing and literature. Her first book of poems, Talking Cure, was published by Texas Tech Press in 1982. She has also written two novels, Customs and Alexandra Freed, both published by Alfred A. Knopf.