Terese Svoboda is the author of ten books of prose and poetry, most recently Black Glasses Like Clark Kent that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her honors in poetry include the Iowa Poetry Prize and two prizes from the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Medwick Award, and Cecil Hemley Award. She has also won an O. Henry Prize for the short story, the Bobst Prize for fiction, a Pushcart Prize for an essay, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in translation. Her opera WET premiered at Los Angeles Disney Hall in 2005. Svoboda lives in New York City.

Other poems by Terese Svoboda in Verse Daily:
November 3, 2008:   "Freud's Container" "I'm always boarding..."
May 15, 2003:  "The Silence of the Tortoise" "He has his back to her..."
December 27, 2002:  "Destiny Manifest" "Your fence meets your fence..."

Books by Terese Svoboda:

Other poems on the web by Terese Svoboda:
"Wooly Bully"
"I Think of Pilgrims"
Three poems
"Aubade"
"The Tanker Never Moves"
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems
Four poems
"Pineal"
Eleven poems
Three poems
"Land's Cape"

Terese Svoboda's Website.

About Weapons Grade:

"Svoboda has such range—of subject, of emotion (from whimsical play to chillingly dead serious), that these poems take you on a wild ride, fast and dangerous, but always in control. This is a goddamn terrific book!"
—Thomas Lux

"Weapons Grade is both whistleblower and elegy, a tour de force in the expansive in-your-face tradition of Susan Griffin and Garry Trudeau. Svoboda is an indefatigably American writer of conscience and acuity—a documentarian and saboteur, satirist and sharp-tongued citizen, her poems dangerous and heartbreaking. 'Forget the rockets'/red glare you so dearly love/and tear down that bright banner blood./We can't be moths attracted by light/we must...chew at the fuse.' Svoboda does, indeed, chew the fuse—inexorably, lyrically, heroically."
—Maureen Seaton

"Let the continent flex its bicep,/ a man built on steroids.' This is Terese Svoboda's grave view of America today, in her new collection Weapons Grade (the name of a grisly atrocity game), but she makes poems that laugh anyway! Here are awful blanks: 'utility/ ... not useful to them really,/ being dead already'; 'I can't read the papers, or/ your face on the phone.' Here are goofball diction and mad rhymes: 'You/ will be furry and sleepy/ after I clear the clearing bête noir/ nette bois/ fête René Char.' Here is a zany typo: 'Man walks into a bra.' Note this perfect domestic sketch: 'her shoes are tied but.' (We never learn but what?!) Sweet- or sharp- tempered comedy empowers Svoboda to address the direst subjects in a prophetic and scary book full of hilarious noises."
—Caroline Knox