Ludlow

Language and landscape come alive in this remarkably colorful story of immigrants in southern Colorado. Among them are Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, Scots. Their struggle to survive is personal, yet they are caught up in larger events of American history in the second decade of the twentieth century, leading to the defining moment of the Ludlow Massacre in April 1914. David Mason’s novel also steps back from the story, questioning whether we can know the truth about it, asking us why we want to know. Ultimately, in its charged and headlong verse, enriched by dialect and dream, Ludlow is about how we say the world, how we speak ourselves into being. Its characters, both fictional and historical figures, are intensely alive even as they are lost. Mason proves what the ancients knew—that verse remains a remarkable medium for the telling of the tale.

David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007, and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and it won the Colorado Book Award. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review. He has also written the libretti for composer Lori Laitman’s opera of The Scarlet Letter and her oratorio, Vedem. He recently won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives near the Garden of the Gods in Colorado with his wife, Anne Lennox.