In the award announcement, Cooper says, "It seems almost impossible that a writer could combine the candor of a memoir with the insight and engagement of a literary essay, but 'Tremolo' seamlessly weaves together the writer's search for sexual self-knowledge with insights into the poetry of Galway Kinnell and the fiction of Jane Austen. The prose here is both exact and inventive, the sensibility as restlessly probing as it is concise. These eighteen pages convey the sense of an entire lifetime, and the impact is as power as any reader could hope for.