Annal:1996 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.46
Respected poet, teacher, and critic Alan Shapiro continues his much-acclaimed explorations of childhood, family, and marriage in Mixed Company. Revealing a world troubled by difference while struggling toward commonality, and with equal attention to historical detail and the poetics of everyday life, from the mythic past to the abrasive intimacies of the present, Shapiro charts the many ways our social and sexual identities are formed, threatened, altered, and, for good or ill, preserved. Deeply felt and ambitious, Mixed Company is an extraordinary…
The Terrible Stories: Poems
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- 1996 NBA–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.46
Lucille Clifton is one of the most distinguished American poets writing today. In The Terrible Stories, her tenth collection of verse, Clifton covers new terrain—cancer and mastectomy, the life of King David, encounters with a vixen fox who is both shaman and muse. Brilliantly honed language, stunning images and sharp rhythms addresses the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, family, sexuality and spirituality, and community in antebellum and contemporary American culture. Hers is a poetry passionate and wise, not afraid to rage or whisper.
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.46
In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Meadowlands explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday. Glück discovers…
Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994
- 1996 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.46
For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing, Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.
Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected
- 1995 NBA–Poetry winner
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.45
Stanley Kunitz, one of the masters of contemporary poetry, presents his ninth collection, gathering a rich selection of his work, including new poems that remind us of his prefatory statement: “Art is the chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.” Nearly all the poems of Kunitz’s later years, beginning with “The Testing-Tree” (1971), are included, and most of the poems in Passing Through are unavailable in any other edition. In “Touch Me,” the last poem in the collection, Kunitz propounds a question, “What makes the engine go?” and gives us his…
Things That Happen Once: New Poems
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.46
Things That Happen Once, Jones’s fifth volume, may well be his finest yet, combining currents of southern evangelism, contemporary sophistication, and passionate moral engagement. Its forty-one poems display an exciting power of language and open up new visions of inheritance and parenthood, sexuality and change. In doing so, these poems release energy that American poets and readers of poetry will eagerly welcome.
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
- 1997 Lenore Marshall winner
- 1997 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.47
The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate.
Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky’s first volume, described this poet’s work as “nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience.” Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky’s art. New poems like “Avenue” and “The City Elegies” envision the urban…
The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.46
The World at Large brings together the best of James McMichael’s poetry and includes works that appear for the first time in this volume. With the publication of the new poems, McMichael surpasses even the formally daring and psychologically penetrating poetry that has characterized his work thus far.
Wise Poison: Poems
- 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.46
In Wise Poison David Rivard gives us a mind hard at work on the most vital questions: Who am I? What do I love? What can be trusted? At issue in these passionate arguments with the self are the “curious forces” that surround us in every part of our lives. In an airport lounge in the Yucatán, in the song of a street musician, or simply in the pulsing of skin along the neck, Rivard finds connections and doubt, and reason for both comfort and rage.
