Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize The poems in "See You Soon" explore the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from the beauty and strangeness of daily experience, testing how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and to one another. There is love in these poems, there is failure and absurdity. The characters, in their various situations and guises, find themselves outside of time, space, and identity at sunset, in an airport, outside a hookah lounge, as a birthday party clown, after a flood. Its message is the invitation of the title. "See You Soon" is a...
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize The poems in "See You Soon" explore the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from...
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward the bean-rusted fields & gutted factories of the Midwest, toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck.
A panoply of voices are at play the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the...
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention aw...
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...
Out of the contradiction, paradox, loss, and strange beauty of contemporary warfare, Brock Jones brings us "Cenotaph," a collection of poems that have as their genesis Jones s deployments to Iraq in 2002 and 2005, when he was in the US Army.
These are war poems, but also love poems and hate poems, poems about dying and living, poems about hope and hopelessness. These are poems that beautifully reflect Jones s resignation to and rejection of the impossibility of saying anything definitive or honest about war.
These are poems that strive to...
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Out of the contradiction, paradox, loss, and strange beauty of contemporary warfare, Brock Jones brin...
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
"A graceful synthesis of poetry and science."
--Billy Collins
Laura McCullough finds passage through the darkest times as she loses, in short order, her mother and her marriage. Through her near unbearable grief, she creates poems that slip between science and nature as she grasps at coordinates in a world spun out of its orbit. From the God Particle to toroidal vortexes, from the slippery linguistics of translation to the translation of the body, McCullough brings readers to the mystery of surrender,...
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
"A poet of great heart and brave directness."
--Billy Collins
In Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poems reassemble safe spaces from the fissures cleaving the speaker's own biracial home and act as witnesses...
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Shows this exceptional poet at his rhyming best.
Billy Collins
Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror presents the mirror that reflects not always what is, but what is desired, or not desired. In the opening poem, the speaker, Diane Arbus, looks at her very early pregnant self and asks, Why would I bring you into this world? This book answers that question, or tries to: the world is what it is as we try to live as our best selves in that world. But that knowledge of the world is hard and has...
Winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Forces an eye-opening change in perspective.
Billy Collins
In Mr. Stevens Secretary, a fictional assistant to Wallace Stevens juggles her roles as a mother, a wife, a believer, and a working woman. Privy at times to the famous poet s personal life, the secretary must balance her curiosity about Stevens with her commitment to her husband, her faith, and the life she desires.
This vivid and compelling character struggles with fears of mental illness and the challenges...
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism's failure to assuage human loneliness, the speakers in these poems find joy in shared meals and glasses of wine, and use moments of mutual attention to challenge notions of class in America.
These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism's fai...
The title of this collection is taken from the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem to capture and nourish themselves on a diverse cast of would-be passers-by, drawing their life-force from the resulting synthesis of characters.
The title of this collection is taken from the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem t...
