Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2003.
This collection of lyrical poems traces the narrative of the loss of love and intellectual powers and a groping towards a new life after a catastrophic illness. The poems describe suffering and the sudden loss of one s prior life and powers, but they also celebrate the gifts that arise from the heart of suffering the importance of the smallest things and the ability to pay fierce attention to them."

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2005.
Michael White s poetry is unusual for its loving patience in imagining how human predicaments feel. Using a striking variety of measures, his meditations attempt to re-enact the grain of consciousness as it plays out, from elegy to simple joy."

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2006.
Grief repairs grief, Michael Robins writes in "The Next Settlement," and in these meditative poems, voices map the world with precision as a way to mend the holes they find in it. Pristine natural landscapes provide a jarring counterpoint to troubled internal terrain. These enigmatic scenes are masterfully rendered with a photographer s eye."

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, 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...

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...

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2014.
In his debut collection, Jordan Windholz recasts devotional poetics and traces the line between faith and its loss. "Other Psalms" gives voice to the skeptic who yet sings to the silence that swells with the noise of listening. If faith is necessary, this collection suggests, it is necessary as material for its own unmaking.
From (psalm):
part self, part song
the psalm drags sense from absence
the eclogue anticipates response
verdant and vined, its verges
overtake the tongue. . ."

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2015.
Winner of the Book Award for Poetry, Maine Literary Awards, 2017.

Bernard A. Booker, old Maine codger and unofficial mayor of Ell Pond, knew the right ways to dig an eight-foot hole, build a maple sugar house out of a water heater, and snatch good white granite from other people's back lots. The wry Yankee woodsman is the subject of Booker's Point, an oral history-inspired portrait-in-verse. Weaving storytelling, natural history, and the poetry of place, this collection evokes the sensibility of rural New...

Winner, Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

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...