Annal:1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1994 LATimes–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.44
Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster—war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb—Forché’s ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forché attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.
Materialism: Poems
- 1994 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.44
In Materialism, her fifth collection, Jorie Graham undertakes a daring book-length meditation on the nature of our restless relationship with matter. With her trade-mark sagacity and vision, Graham unites the complex principles of science and philosophy with a startling array of tangible forms: a man praying in a downtown bakeshop; a crowd at an abortion rally; a survivor of the Stalinist regime alone in her dance studio.
- 1994 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.44
This book is unique, I believe, in the literature of our country’s involvement in Vietnam—certainly it tells a part of that story that still remains largely untold. And as its narrator returns from the mordant nightmare of his 1970 imprisonment (for being AWOL) to the coolly ambiguous landscape of present-day California life, we feel his vision has somehow already become our own.
