Winner, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Randall Jarrell said that when you read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own. In explicit lyrics], we are visitors to a world that is familiar as if the poems are occurring in our town, on the streets where we live. But the laws have changed, and what is normally important is no longer relevant. What was meaningless is now everything.
As the title indicates, these poems are lyrics musings on the small decisions required by...
Winner, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Randall Jarrell said that when you read a poem you are entering a f...
The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard's Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theatre, brotherhood, labour, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard's poems move from Wisconsin to New York and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family.
The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard's Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theatre, brotherhood,...
In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold...
In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the n...
The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior—then to queen, maven, and crone—against the backdrop of suburban America from the 1980s to today. In this bold reframing of the hero’s journey, L. J. Sysko serves up biting social commentary and humorous, unsparing self-critique while enlisting an eccentric cast that includes Betsy Ross as sex worker, Dolly Parton as raptor, and a bemused MILF who exchanges glances with a young man at a gas station. Sysko’s revisions of RenÉ Magritte’s modernist icon The Son of Man and the paintings of...
The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior—then to queen, maven, and crone—against the backdrop o...
