Books

Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Quan Barry explores the universal image of war as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Vietnam, the country of her birth. She also turns her signature lyricism to other topics such as the beauty of Peru or the paintings of Ana Fernandez.

Poetry in America offers lyric and narrative poems that function like works of social realism for our times: hard times, wartime, divorce, times of downturn and dissipated resources.

Wanda Coleman creates the kind of poetry that excites and ignites those who hate poetry, refreshes it for those who are bored by it, and inspires those who want to write it.

“In The World Falls Away, Wanda Coleman’s poems glow with an almost radioactive edginess. Yet, there is also range and substance giving her intense American voice staying power. To use, Whitman’s word, her work has ‘amplitude.'”—Diane Wakoski

Winner of the 2012 annual Book Award presented by The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Winner of the 2010 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

“Glenn Shaheen is claiming new ground for American poetry. His poems are about the nightmares of information overload, collapsing infrastructure, ubiquitous violence, and other ills of late empire. The subjects are not happy, but Shaheen’s clear vision and crisp—often witty—language offer the pleasures of surprise, discovery, and recognition.”—Ed Ochester

“Poems that stick with you like a song that won’t stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart.”—Washington Post on Captivity

“A Song of Songs, which is not Solomon’s but Alicia Ostriker’s. A great age-old hymn to life, to flesh, to memory, is revised again on these pages, with gusto, with passion, with clarity, with eros, with grief. If there is God, it is the mourner’s or the mystic’s God; if there is faith, it is the faith in our future. This is gorgeous poetry, as Jewish as it is universal.”—Ilya Kaminsky

Winner of the 2013 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that explore race from a variety of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives, questioning what it means to be “white” in a multi-racial society.

Winner of the 2013 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry

Frederico Garcia lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca’s sojourn to America, Nathalie Handal, a poet from New York, went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucia. Handal recreated Lorca’s journey in reverse.

Looking for The Gulf Motel offers a genealogy of the heart: how Blanco’s family’s emotional legacy has shaped—and continues shaping—his Latino identity, sexual identity, and understanding of the big questions of life and death.

Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states “It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves.”

Winner of the 2013 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

“Nicole Terez Dutton’s fierce and formidable debut throbs with restless beauty and a lyrical undercurrent that is both empowered and unpredictable. Every poem is unsettling in that delicious way that changes and challenges the reader. There is nothing here that does not hurtle forward.”—Patricia Smith

Whirlwind is one woman’s heartfelt, yet mordantly witty, sexy exploration of the breakup of a marriage in poems that keep their linguistic edge while seething with a story they must tell.

Winner of the 2011 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Selected by Dorianne Laux

This collection examines how the loss of a parent at a young age can color the way that child looks at the world even when the child is no longer a child.

Dore Kiesselbach’s poems reveal the particularity and/or strangeness of the commonplace—but many good poems do that. What strikes me about his, though, are the ways that visual imagery, diction, and cadence are modulated to fit his subjects. Thus in ‘Rake’ the inanimate object speaks (as in an Anglo-Saxon kenning) to describe the way it touches ‘death / that life may be revealed / in green stupidity . . . fluent / as underwater hair.’ In ‘Hickey,’ a diver swimming among stingrays asks, ‘How long does it take us / in water sunlight permeates / to forget needing ever to be told?’; the unusual diction suggests both the speaker’s suspension in water as well as his apprehension of joy. The reader may hear faint echoes of Hopkins or the early Dylan Thomas, but the language is Kiesselbach’s own.

Appetite is a book of poetry that explores identity, particularly masculinity, through the lenses of popular culture, relationships, and place.