Soul Patch
Winner of the 2025 Off the Grid Poetry Prize,
selected by Gregory Orr
Elton Glaser’s tenth collection drafts a portrait of “a world in love with its dying,” touching on the cruelties and absurdities of public life and the pain of personal reflection: “We don’t know / How deep the dark goes down / Before it reaches bottom.” In search of some reconciliation among the impulses that pull us part, he resolves: “I’m working on a hybrid between / The hormones and the sacraments.” And what can a poet do but offer:
these little reckonings of
Warning and desire, these lines bred somewhere beyond
The unruly reaches of the moon, beyond the lectures and corrections.
Gregory Orr describes Soul Patch as a work “full of strong lyric wit and moral fervor.” It is also full of fight. Glaser’s irreverence and fury (“I take my adrenaline straight, with a dash of bitters”) act as a balm, a proverbial patch in these times of daily injury, bracing readers for the next blow. “Listen,” the poet urges. “Sometimes things have to get ugly / Before beauty shows itself.”
“Poems of an intelligence struggling with our perilous cultural moment and trying to persuade it to sing. Epigrammatic, sardonic—very impressive”
“
Every Elton Glaser poem is a celebration that nonetheless counts despair among the guests, a celebration of the ironic, the sardonic, the iconic, and even the occasional gin & tonic. In Soul Patch, he has constructed a kind of bemusement park in which the rides feature linguistic energy, flamboyance, and humor. Puns, epigrams, and jokes. It’s a place where the demotic refuses to genuflect before the vatic.”
About the Author
Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, where he also directed the University of Akron Press and edited the Akron Series in Poetry. Glaser has published nine full-length collections of poetry, most recently Ghost Variations (Pittsburgh, 2023). With William Greenway, he coedited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (Akron, 2002). Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Poetry Award, and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has also won a Pushcart Prize.
