Annal:1994 Walt Whitman Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Walt Whitman Award in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything: Poems
- 1994 Walt Whitman winner
- Score: 10.44
In selecting Jan Richman’s dazzling first collection of poems as winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award, Robert Pinsky praised Richman for the “rowdy, restless intelligence” of her work, the “sense of purpose” in her poems, and her wit, which is “ready to question anything, including the poses of identity itself.” Indeed, these incisive poems, “attractive, flamboyant, and comic” on their surface, plunge into bitter experience—and survive it by means of an “ardent, sardonic skepticism,” a defiant sense of self, and pure art.
Richman arranges her poems in two…
