Winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Craig Arnold's Shells was acclaimed as "a gifted collection of daring writing" by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. "Friendships based on food," Arnold writes, "are rarely stable"--this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching...
Winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Craig Arnold's Shells was acclaimed as "a gifted collection of daring writing" by the con...
The 1999 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs's Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as "a book of exploration, of searching regard.... a grave, attentive holding of a light" by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs's experiences as a guide and park ranger...
The 1999 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs's Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as "a book of exploration, of sea...
This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Sean Singer's Discography.Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced, the poems in this book delight in sound and approach the more abstract pleasures of music. Singer takes as his subjects music, jazz figures, and historical events. Series judge W. S. Merwin praises Singer for his "roving demands on his language" and "the quick-changes of his invention in search of some provisional rightness."
This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Sean Singer's Discography.Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced,...
Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gluck hails the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. She notes, "Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to...
Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and l...
Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Gluck observes in her foreword, "Green Squall begins and ends in the garden"; however, Hopler's gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyric--his gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hopler's work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevens's tropical extrapolations, there lies beneath...
Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Gluck observes in her foreword, "<...
Jessica Fisher's Frail-Craft is Louise Gluck's fourth selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary prize in the United States. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, the poet meditates on the problems and possibilities, the frail craft, of perception for the reader or the dreamer, maintaining that 'if the eye can love - and it can, it does - then I held you and was held'. In her foreword to the book, Louise Gluck writes, 'What gives Jessica Fisher's work its sense of form, of repose, is her perfection of ear. That repose, with its strange mobility, its...
Jessica Fisher's Frail-Craft is Louise Gluck's fourth selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary prize in the United S...
Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes--identity, war, religion, what we hold in common--while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Gluck describes the poet in her Foreword as "that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas." She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, "These are small poems, many of them,...
Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big ...
Nicholas Samaras's Hands of the Saddlemaker, the winning volume in the 1991 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 710 entries in this annual competition. The broad theme of Samaras's poems is the connection between eternal things and the passing world, between our sense of exile and our sense of commonality. Equilibrium between these worlds is achieved only through human feeling, through language. Samaras examines the commonality of experience in diverse international settings--from Byzantium to the cathedrals of technology in the modern cities of America....
Nicholas Samaras's Hands of the Saddlemaker, the winning volume in the 1991 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 7...
Winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award presented in the United States. Ansel Elkins's poetry collection, Blue Yodel, is the 109th volume to be so honored. Esteemed poet and competition judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her "arresting use of persona," calling her poems "razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility." In her imaginative and haunting debut...
Winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the ag...
