Annal:1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Blizzard of One: Poems
- 1999 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.49
- 1998 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 1999 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.48
Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist.
In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era’s angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth’s passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present. In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley’s poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she…Going Fast: Poems
- 1999 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.49
In his sixth collection of poems, Frederick Seidel continues to create the inventive, often brutal verse that has brought his work passionate acclaim. Seidel’s elegantly assured work juxtaposes political and aesthetic realities of the postmodern world in constantly disruptive and uncompromising images that are eerie, disturbing, and remarkably beautiful.
The poems in Going Fast are set in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Bologna, and Tahiti.



