Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2008. Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the cornfields, but as she promises, "nothing happened." In the fields, in the woods, in the dark water of Ohio, something is happening. Girls disappear, turn on each other. Men watch from the rearview as the narrator hedges, changes her mind, then shows all in this break-out collection of bittersweet and cataclysmic lyrics. "Alison Stine writes, Believe me.' I am telling you a story, ' and the story she tells us we believe as it unfolds. The poems...
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2008. Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the ...
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2012 With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus will appeal to sons and fathers, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language. "A down-to-earth intelligence and an acute alertness to the gritty movement of language are what you'll treasure most in Matt Miller's Club Icarus. You just might pass this book on to a...
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2012 With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus will appeal to sons and fathers, to those t...
Trying to make sense of a disordered world, Stefanie Wortman's debut collection examines works of art as varied as casts of antique sculpture, 19th-century novels, and even scenes from reality television to investigate the versions of order that they offer. These deft poems yield moments of surprising levity even as they mount a sharp critique of human folly. "Intensity of heart, intensity of mind, flowering as one: Stefanie Wortman's poems redeem 'wit' back to its root meaning of 'insight' or 'vision, ' the same root as the Sanskrit 'veda.' For example: the resonance of 'shades' when the...
Trying to make sense of a disordered world, Stefanie Wortman's debut collection examines works of art as varied as casts of antique sculpture, 19th-ce...
In this debut collection, Anna Lena Phillips Bell explores the foothills of the Eastern U.S., and the old-time Appalachian tunes and Piedmont blues she was raised to love. With formal dexterity--in ballads and sonnets, Sapphics and amphibrachs--the poems in Ornament traverse the permeable boundary between the body and the natural world.
"Ornament is a kind of tribute album. The poet, who is also a banjo player, pays tribute in many poems to the old-time music of the Carolinas, and like the music, her poems are marked by bursts of lyric...
Winner, Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
In this debut collection, Anna Lena Phillips Bell explores the foothills of the Eastern U.S., and the ...
In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert’s eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling the irresistible pull of water—what Melville called “the ungraspable phantom of life.”
In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing...