Honor roll:Walt Whitman Award
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Walt Whitman Award. They are ranked by honors received.
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Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems
“A startling first collection of poems—startling because of bone-crushing violence and poverty and startling also because of the beautiful and precise language the poet brings on these scenes, violent or not…. The genius of these poems is that they insist on seeking the human despite devastating circumstances. Even the most wrung-out individual must still have a soul.” —James Tate, from his judge’s citation
The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas’ border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the harshness of her youth with the beauty, inventiveness, and musicality of language. Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death haunt Carolina Ghost Woods, which is set amid the lush landscape of the South and enfolds the wildness—inclement and consoling by turns—of nature and agriculture. Jordan, though, reveals compassion as well as passion for her subject matter and the people in her poems, creating lines of hope and chords of ecstatic energy out of despair. She offers…
Bite Every Sorrow: Poems
Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, whether on a Costa Rican bus “hot enough to contain all desire” or on a BART train abundantly full of experience and memory, whether delighting in the wacky wisdom of kids or ruing the silly hunger of adults, Ras’s poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies. Lines that find their start in the seemingly personal reach out toward questions that matter to everyone, how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.
Notes from the Divided Country: Poems
In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts some of the most difficult, most unanswerable questions—colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, love. She considers what a homeland would be, for a divided nation and divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen or exile.
In settings from New York to San Francisco, Scotland to Seoul, her poems question “what threads hold/our lives together” in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man’s-land between every “you” and “I,” her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past, and hope for the future.
With its wide range of voices, styles and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.
The Waker's Corridor: Poems
“I had a clock it woke all day,” writes Jonathan Thirkield at the outset of The Waker’s Corridor, a book that charts an assiduous attempt to recover lost time. Housed in elaborate and varied formal architectures, these poems navigate the disorder and gaps left by the violence of loss. All measures of time—psychological, personal, historical, numerical—collide and overlap in intensely lyrical verse. What results is a journey that winds through shifting lands and interiors, across theatrical stages and city streets, into voices and objects that emerge in sudden, vivid relief, and just as quickly disappear. By turns dreamlike and sternly rational, arcane and contemporary, intimate and dramatic, it is a book of blinding, austere, and beautiful awakenings.
Sex at Noon Taxes: Poems
Playfully invading the traditional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems in Sex at Noon Taxes mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body. While one poem admonishes the reader to “Forget the phonics / of the focal/fecal. Phrase, / fashion, and effuse,” in another the speaker says, “I refine my sense of / pain when you touch me / with something blue.” A preoccupation with the visual, artists, and artwork seeps through many of these imagistic minitexts. These poems look for release in descriptions of physical acts and in intricate manipulations of language. Sometimes they find it: “Along comes the sentence to / break up the monotony of possession.” More often, though, the questions they pose resist answers: “What extravagant / commodity is sex?” and “Which el- / lipsis omits love?” Gender identification blurs as the poems probe theories of articulation and investigate the geographies…
Floating City: Poems
Anne Pierson Wiese’s first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life’s routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one’s mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world.
Half Wild: Poems
Half Wild is spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O’Reilley’s collection hangs on to life like the bee “up to his hips in love” who “will fall asleep in the snow” and “wake up still kissing his flower.” In O’Reilley’s poems, human, animal, and mineral creations interpenetrate and share surreal conversation—even stones exchange stories of “hot times in the magma” and animals are listened to intently. Here sacred inquiry is grounded in a passion for the natural world, resolving questions through lyric, erotic, and sensual response. The poems of Half Wild revel in desire and longing as instruments of theological critique.
Resin: Poems
In poems of quiet force, Geri Doran maps the fragility of human connection and the irreducible fact of grief. From the communal ruptures of Chechnya and Rwanda to the personal dislocations that attend great loss, Resin weighs frailty against responsibility, damage against the desires of the heart. For the poet, a factory fire in late-nineteenth-century Portland becomes a tool for precise knowing: “The phases of wood are a means / of dead reckoning: burn what is built / and gauge your passage / by what is lost.” Even in so quotidian an act as the planting of potatoes, Doran’s sure, meticulous, and carefully calibrated lines reveal the intensity of our yearnings: “What carried us from year to year was yield: / potatoes in, potatoes out, like rowing.”
Variously plaintive, passionate, intuitive, and serious, the voice in Resin tells how the natural world, in both its wildness and regularity, expresses and mediates human longing.
You entered me like migraine, left
like migraine a private vacancy…
Invisible Bride: Poems
Tony Tost’s exhilarating poetry debut defies conventional description. Like a fantastic film, a feverish delirium, or a dream state, these prose poems use an experimental lexicon of imagery that goes beyond anything typically poetic. Tost’s point of departure is the loss of the Other that makes the I: Agnes. And in a sort of coming-of-age soliloquy song, he meditates on a range of topics: fatherhood, childhood, identity, poetry. Together his poems express the unburdening of consciousness, a consciousness that contains the likes of Blake, Italo Calvino, Allen Grossman, and Frank Stanford, among others (including Tost himself).
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