Sort of a Cento: The Labyrinths by Mark Wagenaar

2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist

Image | Mark Wagenaar

Caption: Mark Wagenaar won the 2015 CBC Poetry Prize. (Candid Clicker Photography)

Mark Wagenaar has made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Sort of a Cento: The Labyrinths.

About Mark

Mark Wagenaar is the 2016 winner of Red Hen Press' Benjamin Saltman Prize, for his book Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, forthcoming late spring 2018. His first two, The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising), and Voodoo Inverso, won the Juniper Prize & the Pollak Prize, respectively. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, 32 Poems, Field, Southern Review, Image, & many others. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the U of North Texas and an MFA from the U of Virginia. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Valparaiso University. Husband of poet Chelsea Wagenaar, he is proud to be a daddy to two-year-old Eloise, and her sibling, also forthcoming late spring 2018.

First lines

There's a problem on the horizon—
there is no horizon,
the minotaur said to us on the sidewalk.
I thought he was talking about middle age,
or my receding hairline, maybe global warming.
As if he were an explorer come to the edge
​of some great beyond, a sea beyond our imagining.