Honor roll:Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. They are ranked by honors received.
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Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
A collection of poems from the author’s earlier books combined with a dozen new poems interweave memory and history.
Middle Earth: Poems
In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole’s melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man’s creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of “a man alone,” trying “to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence.” Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are “marvels—unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic—burned into being” (Tina Barr, Boston Review).
Modern Life: Poems
Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, “The Future of Terror” and “The Terror of the Future,” Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world. Her prose pieces and lyrics examine the divided, halved self in poems about centaurs, ship figureheads, and a robot boy. Throughout, Harvey’s signature wit and concision show us the double-sided nature of reality, of what we see and what we know.
Luck Is Luck: Poems
From the snowy egret to a woman’s floating rib, nudism in America to Holy Communion, Simone de Beauvoir to Nathan’s hot dogs–the subjects in Lucia Perillo’s fourth collection of poetry lift off from surprising places and touch down on new ground. Hers is a vision like no other. In “To My Big Nose,” she muses: “hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature—a gryphon or sphinx.”
Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In “Languedoc,” she writes, “Long ago / I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons / but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument / that looks like a gourd with strings attached / (the problem is always the strings attached).”
Perillo’s versions of nature are always unflinching:…
Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005
Rodney Jones has been called “the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry” (Southern Review). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four new pieces. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. There is no subject that he will not touch, and in his detailed vision of his Alabama childhood, he ennobles a misunderstood community. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”
Michael Ryan's New and Selected Poems is the first collection to appear in fifteen years from this acclaimed and masterly poet. Comprising fifty-seven poems from three award-winning volumes and thirty-one brilliant new poems, it displays the wit and passion he has brought to universal themes throughout his career. In both dramatic lyrics and complex narratives, Ryan renders the world with startling clarity, freshness, and intimacy.
Ryan”s poems are filled with the stuff of everyday life: What-a-Burger, Space Invaders, “the hood ornament / on some chopped down hot rod of the apocalypse.” He observes his subjects in carefully wrought detail and with a fierce compassion, describing “stupid posters of rock stars” in the bedroom of a murdered teenager, or a homeless boy “straggle-haired, bloated, / eyes shining like ice.” As Ryan writes of others, in a final “Reminder” to himself: “their light—their light—/ pulls so surely. Let it.”
This long-awaited collection shows Ryan at the height of his powers. As William H. Pritchard said in The Nation, “Unlike…
The Art of the Lathe: Poems
B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems covering a wide range of subjects, though it centers on the working-class world of the midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.
Split Horizon: Poems
Thomas Lux is the author of such books as Sunday, Half Promised Land, and The Drowned River. His poetry has been steadily growing and penetrating deeper into the plain-spoken, saturnine, witty language that he virtually invented. In his latest work, Lux’s level gaze, cool talk, weird rhythms, and quirky humor place him in a special territory—entirely original—of contemporary American poetry. These new poems, like the book itself, have unusual titles (“Loudmouth Soup,” “Virgule,” “Each Startled Touch Returns the Touch Unstartled”) and circle around their subjects in strange ways, most often dealing with the lonely oddity of the individual in a society that inflexibly ignores individuality.
Rapture: Poems
Rapture is the newest collection from a remarkable voice in American poetry. Susan Mitchell’s poems are about self-discovery, and how memory and experience blend to lead us to newer, more realized and complex selves. Mitchell’s gift is her ability to see, with humor and acuity, the extraordinary within the commonplace. Whether listening to a jazz pianist reaching for new sounds as he lingers over a hotel piano or recalling a runaway child on a bus trip across America, Mitchell guides us into a world of her narratives, a world in which she creates her reality by the mere act of observing it, and this reality, at once wholly unique and deeply familiar, has an exhilarating capacity for transcendence. Combining a boldly realistic vision with graceful, evocative lyricism, and moving easily between free verse and elegant versification, Rapture confirms Mitchell’s place as one of the most compelling poets writing today.
Space Walk: Poems
Space Walk blasts off into realms of experience that show the imagination’s limitless capacity to be both brutal and uplifting. While many of the poems in this daring collection confront head-on our current American realities of empire, state violence, the endless “crisis-chatter” of talking heads, and the eerie, weightless feeling of impending catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope.
In Tom Sleigh’s poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom’s kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love’s intergalactic amplitude. As the poet writes in “After Netzsche”: “In the face that must conceal / what is necessary / to bear / love appears in the face / of the face of what is necessary.”
Hailing Tom Sleighs work, the Los Angeles Times writes that he stakes a claim on the planet of the imagination. In The New Yorkers words, he asserts the importance of poetry itself, showing us in Space Walk its restorative, recuperative powers.
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