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2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award

Diode Editor & Art Director Law Alsobrook's design for Conor Bracken's full-length debut THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS ME won a 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award for outstanding cover artwork! Congratulations, Conor & Law!


Each year, the Eric Hoffer Award presents the da Vinci Eye to books with superior cover artwork. Cover art is judged on both content and style. The da Vinci Eye is given in honor of the historic artist, scientist, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. This is an additional distinction beneath the Eric Hoffer Award umbrella.


In his debut collection of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me, Conor Bracken traces the nerves of toxic masculinity—white as maggots but taut as lyre strings—that twitch and fizz inside events as homegrown as school shootings and as distant as the execution of medieval French heretics. Everywhere, though, there are bodies: the stout slouch of Henry Kissinger in a towel, a headless snake writhing in a footwell, a cantor with a beautiful voice and an inexorable need to be touched. And then there’s the body of our speaker: “white and alive and in love” and damaged by the same ravenous appetites he isn’t always able to curb. There is no hero here, only a song that turns towards and away from reckoning with the costs the neo-imperial world order extracts from bodies both supine and thrashing. These poems flicker like fire and billow like night’s velvet curtain, which you can “roughen with one hand / and smooth with the other.”

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