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Winner of the 2013 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. “Like us, palm trees are imports, and seem to come from everywhere but here,” writes a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in an article lamenting the dying days of the once-ubiquitous palm trees of L.A. Named for those iconic imported exotics that flank the boulevards of America’s strangest city, PALM TREES is a collection of poems characterized by a revved-up, ruminative musicality, and it issues its swan song in a voice that channels the restless globalism of America in the new century. The poems shuttle from airport to boardroom, boardroom to living room, making the kind of foreboding observations that might issue from a drug-addled and paranoid Delphic Oracle.
Winner of the NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD in 2013
“I immediately noticed that Twemlow writes his poems in a continuous stream of consciousness. And I mean the most random of random thoughts and transitions. Perhaps dreamlike, maybe drug-induced; I don’t really know, and it doesn’t even matter. What matters the most is that I really like Twemlow’s style, no hiding behind carefully chosen prose for this man — his poems are completely exposed. Twemlow writes of Chicago, Kansas, karate, confetti, wanting to keep someone locked up behind a Richter (as in, Gerhard), and he writes of sterile offices.” – Bookslut
“‘At once lasting and ephemeral, like the sting of a wasp or a solid punch in the stomach, the poems in this collection distinguish themselves by their immediacy as well as their violence.” Denise Jarrott
“The bright, pulsing heart steeps through The White House in the way starlings flit through Palm Trees, the effect being to transcend a world that is out of synch, full of holes, absent of poetry.” – HTMLGIANT
“I found that within my own work I often think of the poem as a third dream-state just in the sense that I’m entering, when I’m enjoying the writing, into a place where virtually anything can happen. So I suppose that accounts for some of the psychological texture of some of the works.” – Interview with The Austinist
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