Aza
Pace
Poet. Educator. Editor.
About
Aza Pace is the author of Her Terrible Splendor, which won the Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books in March 2025. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, and she is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes. Aza holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Her Terrible Splendor
Lyrical, intelligent, and exquisitely crafted, Aza Pace’s debut poetry collection, Her Terrible Splendor, looks to the ancient myth of Circe to tell the story of an East Texas girlhood. Through contemporary encounters with the sorceress who was once made famous by Homer, the poet examines the dangers of becoming a woman, that fraught transformation when the body blooms “open like a terrible rose” and the world teaches us “to be fearful now.” Circe functions here as a source of power as well as inspirational figure, offering Pace a fearless model for how to pursue a life in the arts, poetry its own form of witchcraft.
--Jehanne Dubrow, author of Civilians
Here, Aza Pace reinvents the myth of the Homeric witch Circe, transporting her from Aeaea to East Texas and discovering multitudes in her story, her voice and the voices of those around her. Here, Circe is threatening and enchanting, distant mirror and alter-ego, muse and lover, horror and metaphor. She is the source of art and the reflection of the artist, a complex “woman you cannot resist / So like a plum (careful, the pit).” Her Terrible Splendor is a magnificent high-wire act of persona, ventriloquism and prismatic lyric poetry—and a terrific first book I’ll return to with great pleasure.
--Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears
In one of the many poems in Her Terrible Splendor invoking the witch-goddess Circe, Aza Pace writes, “I don’t believe / in muses.” But Circe does serve as a tutelary spirit and interlocutor, rising out of a book on a bedside table and into the rugged East Texas landscape to guide the poet’s reckoning with coming of age as a woman and an artist. Like Circe, who finds power in relation to her island, its flora and fauna, Pace draws on the environment where she grew up as a source for the enchantments and transformations of her poems. “Then we can agree / never to turn from the physical world,” she insists to Circe at the end of a poem aptly called “Praise.” With Her Terrible Splendor, Pace has fashioned a spellbinding and accomplished debut.
—Corey Marks, author of The Rock That Is Not a Rabbit
Select Poems
“Mine” and “A Landscape Misread.” Bennington Review. (forthcoming)​
"Calling." Elysium Review.
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"Painting Nocturnal Birds" & "Do You Know the Bur Oaks." Amsterdam Review.
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“Listening In.” The Florida Review.
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“Twelve Women in a Circle with Candles” and “Portrait of Nymphs Bathing.” The Southern Review and Best American Poetry "Pick of the Week."
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“Listing” and “Chickadee.” The Arkansas International.
“After Reading Sappho.” The Adroit Journal.
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"The Still Hours" and "How Should I Name My Friend?" Crazyhorse (now Swamp pink).
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“Welcome to the Solar System, Welcome to the Woods.” Southeast Review.
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“The Sorceress.” The South Carolina Review.
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“Postcards.” Indianapolis Review.
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“Finally, a New Gaze.” Tupelo Quarterly.
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“Mimic.” Bayou Magazine.
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"Sugar on My Tongue." Mudlark.
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"Chapel." Poets.org. Winner of the 2021 Voertman/Academy of American Poets University Prize.
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"Girls." Passages North.
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"Invisible Bodies." New Ohio Review.
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"My Father Asks What I'm Looking At." Poets.org Winner of the 2020 Voertman/Academy of American Poets University Prize.
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“Behind the Lattice.” Copper Nickel.
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"Definition in the Woods" and "Praise to the Nightjar." The Boiler.
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“The Day I Meet Circe,” “Q&A with Circe,” “The Day I Met Odysseus,” “Circe Recalls the Nymph Scylla,” and “Witch in My Forest: Fragments.” Mudlark.​
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News
Voertman/Academy of American Poets Prize 2021
Kiki Petrosino has selected "Chapel" by Aza Pace as the winner of the 2021 Voertman / Academy of American Poets Prize.
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Petrosino writes: "This poem finds ecstasy in the earthbound, choosing the language of leaf-light over theology's "narrow blue." I admire the finely wrought imagery & the deep intimacy of the address as we witness the body becoming a net(work), sifting & holding all there is, in this world, to love."
Voertman/Academy of American Poets Prize 2020
Kathleen Graber has selected "My Father Asks What I'm Looking At" by Aza Pace as the winner of the 2020 Voertman / Academy of American Poets Prize.
Graber writes: "My Father Asks What I'm Looking At" unfolds at the intersection of image and imagination. Advancing at the pace of a quiet evening coming on, this poem offers its readers a steadily deepening exploration into the mystery of our connection to one another and to all things."