The winning volume in the 1993 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Thinking the World Visible, by Valerie Wohlfeld. As James Dickey, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said, "Valerie Wohlfeld's words give the sense of a poet whose mind has been suddenly freed and is active in a new way. My impression of her is as a spirit-woman, a female shaman or Eve who takes power over the natural world by naming it, using the same words that have always served but with her own truly imaginative angle of vision."

Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, --Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin.-- This cycle of --freewheeling sonnets-- (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second...

In 1919 Yale University Press inaugurated the Yale Series of Younger Poets, designed to "afford a public medium for the work of young men and women who have not yet secured a wide public recognition." This anthology of the longest-running poetry series in the United States tells the story of American poetry in this century. At first a forum for a conservative taste in parochial college verse, the Younger Poets Series soon opened up to unconventional but profound young talents from across the country--such as James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, William Meredith, Adrienne Rich, John...

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Loren Goodman's Famous Americans. Hilarious, eclectic, and bizarre, this collection takes the reader on a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture. Employing a variety of forms (from epistolary to script to interview and beyond), this work proves to be as much about exploring frameworks as it is about examining the lives of famous and not-so-famous Americans. Goodman questions our concept of what it means to be an icon: he disrupts our assumptions, creating an alternate universe in which...

The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus's The Cuckoo, chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Gluck. It is Gluck's first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Gluck praises Streckfus's art for its "nonsense and mystery," its "mesmerizing beauty" and "luminous...

The winning volume in the 1988 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Out of the Woods by Thomas Bolt. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: -Here is an up-to-date pastoral: wrecked cars, glades of debris, polluted streams, all gravely held in Thomas Bolt's unflinching gaze. 'I had found, ' he writes, 'the secret center of America.' Given this wealth of evidence, its bleakness and sparkle, we can almost bring ourselves to believe him.- A Hill in Virginia In this rude worldMemory pertainsIn bald things, Of promises skipped over, violenceOr...

Winner of the 1978 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition

The winning volume in the 1989 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Hermit with Landscape by Daniel Hall. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: "Daniel Hall is a patient craftsman, a weigher of each word. Smaller and more lucid than their model, his imitations of life place no burden upon us; rather, their deftness lightens our step. Here mind once again outdances the monumental." Tidal A moth hove out of fog. All I heardwas the incessant dissolvingof the surf, attenuated, drawnthrough eggshell, bone and ashas through the walls of another room....