"Mira Rosenthal"s The Local World incorporates deeply lived experience and mystery in a fluent shape-shifting that can take you anywhere-- and bring you back, changed. The poems are beautifully crafted narratives of loss, travel, and salvage. There is a damaged family at the heart of these poems, an abandoned farm, and many rooms, parks, and train cars in far places. Yet, like all really good poems, Rosenthal"s language consistently rises above its cries to wonder and beauty. What a joy to find this stunning first book to award the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize." --Maggie Anderson, Judge