The seventh winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is J. Allyn Rosser's Foiled Again. Ms. Rosser's third poetry collection contains poems of startling range and depth. At the heart of the work is a kind of crazed optimism-a quixotic, wryly cheerful pilgrimage through the maze of bafflement, loneliness, and love that constitutes our experience. Her poems pursue the transcendent certitudes we crave, and invites us to embrace the present as a revelation we forgot to have. The New Criterion, one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry, established an annual poetry prize in 2000,...

Rosser s poems have always given a squinty sideways glance at cultural foibles and assumptions. Her distinctive brand of cheery skepticism implies that the genuine pursuit of truth is a virtue that renders tolerable the intolerable. These poems achieve a lyricism that gives free reign to the lush energies of language while remaining transparent enough to communicate something precise, fresh, and unsettling.
A driving force behind the poems in "Mimi s Trapeze" is Rosser s profound curiosity about all forms and conditions of life. Without distorting fact or motive, her speakers seek to...