Bøger i Miller Williams Poetry Prize serien

Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares.

In the same way that the speaker in these poems often seems itinerant, lacking a place or person to call home, the poems themselves have their own roaming quality. The reader is moved somewhere unexpected, the poems seem to shapeshift or suddenly beckon from somewhere else, or they may zoom into focus.

Haunted as much by place and people, landscapes and distant figures, as by the possibilities of image-making itself, Eternal Sentences is a song for the hidden depots of rural America.

Madeleine Wattenberg's debut collection alternates between epistolary poems to the mythical figure Io and lyrical interrogations of science, myth, and the historical record. Wattenberg casts Io - the priestess of Hera who was turned into a heifer - as a woman struggling to navigate the terrain between choice and coercion.

"In Jessica Poli's Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love, desire, and grief"--

"To Be Named Something Else, winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage-both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix's debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith, "enlivens the everyday-the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living.""--

"This whip-smart collection is a playful celebration of feminine power." --Publisher's Weekly "What a beautiful book." > "With the verve of Alice Fulton and the panache of Gerald Stern, Sysko keens into the canon, a welcome voice. Sing, indeed, heavenly muse." > Finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Selected by Patricia Smith The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior--then to queen, maven, and crone--against the backdrop of suburban America from the 1980s to today. In this bold reframing of the hero's journey, L. J. Sysko serves up biting social commentary and humorous, unsparing self-critique while enlisting an eccentric cast that includes Betsy Ross as sex worker, Dolly Parton as raptor, and a bemused MILF who exchanges glances with a young man at a gas station. Sysko's revisions of René Magritte's modernist icon The Son of Man and the paintings of baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose extraordinary talent was nearly eclipsed after she took her rapist to trial, loom large in this multifaceted portrait of womanhood. With uncommon force, The Daughter of Man confronts misogyny and violence, even as it bursts with nostalgia, lust, and poignant humor.

"'When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,' writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss"--Provided by publishe

"In 'The Trouble with Light,' Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. Largely set in the poet's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Clark's portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection"

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati's Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet's uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, "You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what's missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong." Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

"Finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams poetry prize selected by Patricia Smith"--Cover.