From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Yale Younger Poets Prize. They are ranked by honors received.
You may also enjoy these honor rolls:
Crush
Richard Siken
Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.
In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big…. They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”
Ultima Thule
Davis McCombs
Ultima Thule (pronounced “thool”) is the mythical farthest point north, the coldest and remotest spot on earth. It is also the name of the most inaccessble changer in Mammoth Cave, which McCombs brings to life in his poetry. The cave’s limestone formations and the underground river that carves its spaces make a sort of echo chamber for the heartbeats of the author and his friends and neighbors, of whose lives the immense but buried cave is the dominant feature and metaphor.
It Is Daylight
Arda Collins
Mesmerizing and electric, her volume
It Is Daylight reads as a series of dramatic monologues articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic…a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”
The Earth in the Attic
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah’s
The Earth in the Attic is this year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—
while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession…have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable.
The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”
Frail-Craft
Jessica Fisher
The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”
Green Squall
Jay Hopler
As Louise Glück observes in her foreword, “
Green Squall begins and ends in the garden”; however, Hopler’s gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyric—his gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hopler’s work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevens’s tropical extrapolations, there lies beneath
Green Squall’s lush tropical surfaces a terrifying world in which nightmare and celebration are indistinguishable, and hope is synonymous with despair.
The Cuckoo
Peter Streckfus
In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Glück praises Streckfus’s art for it “nonsense and mystery,” its “mesmerizing beauty” and “luminous high-mindedness.”
The Dung Pile
The varied voices of crows rose and fell. As I lay in the grass…
Famous Americans
Loren Goodman
Hilarious, eclectic, and bizarre, this collection takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride through the absurdities of American pop culture. Employing a variety of forms (from epistolary to script to interview and beyond), this work proves to be as much about exploring frameworks as it is about examining the lives of famous and not-so-famous Americans—and a few non-Americans as well, Goodman questions our concept of what it means to be an icon: he disrupts our assumptions, creating an alternate universe in which nothing remains sacred.
Discography
Sean Singer
Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced, the poems in this book delight in sound and approach the more abstract pleasures of music. The poems range widely in form, from broken typographical fields to variants of the sonnet. Similarly, the poet’s subjects range widely, but most often he writes about music and musicians. Series judge W. S. Merwin praises Singer for his “roving demands upon his language” and “the quick-changes of his invention in search of some provisional rightness.”
Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions
Maurice Manning
These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin.
