How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? – the just-released poetry collection by Pittsburgh author Lori Jakiela – won the 2021 Wicked Woman Prize from Washington, D.C.-based-publisher Brickhouse Books. The Wicked Woman Prize celebrates poems that focus on women who’ve “broken the mold.”
“I’m not sure which mold I’ve broken, but I hope a lot of them,” Jakiela, 57, who grew up and lives now in Trafford, Pa. says. “I hope I’m speaking for some women like me who’ve reached mid-life and are wondering, ‘What fresh hell is this?’ Bless you, Dorothy Parker. And bless you Hemingway, my first and forever love, even though Hemingway isn’t always seen as a fan of wicked women. I think he was, even so.”
According to the publisher’s website, Jakiela’s collection, which reads more like memoir than poetry, “shatters numerous conventions, showcases a woman who has suffered, survived, and is able to laugh, and offer readers hope that they’ll see themselves in these tough, tender poems.”
Jakiela is the author of three memoirs, as well as a poetry collection, an essay collection, and several limited- edition chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburg-Post Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity, Vol 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. She received the Saroyan Prize from Stanford University in 2016 for Excellence in International Literature (for her memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe) and multiple Golden Quill Awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. She writes a regular feature – Stories of Our Neighbors – for Pittsburgh Magazine and directs the undergraduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she is a professor of English and Creative and Professional Writing.
Of How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? author and poet Kareem Tayyar writes:
“Jakiela, like such top-tier American poets as Grace Paley, Edward Field, and Billy Collins, is able to write confessional poems that are equal parts ruminative and humorous, and she does it all while sustaining a gorgeous lyricism. . . . It’s impossible to say exactly what I loved about How Do You Like it Now, Gentlemen? her new, prize-winning collection of poems. She writes so beautifully about such a variety of subjects—motherhood, literature, small-towns, marriage, Walt Whitman, fathers, hometowns, middle-age, Hemingway, difficult jobs – that all I know with any certainty is that this is as warm-hearted a book as I’ve ever read.”
Jakiela will give several online readings to celebrate her latest book’s launch. One through the Arts Club of Washington D.C. on Oct. 13 at noon. And another through the Enoch Pratt Library with Wicken Woman contest judge Nancy Naomi Carlson at 6:30 p.m. EST on October 14. All events are free and open to the public, but advance registration is required.
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