Bøger i Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award serien

"From these pages flows a warm and breathy voice that sings up the Tuscan countryside but also traffics in the quiddities of hardscrabble Americana: beers drunk, cars wrecked, guns fired, songs sung, lovers kissed and missed. It's as though there's nothing this voice can't say; it's personal, provocative." - David Kirby.

In poems inspired by and sometimes borrowing their forms from the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer addressing and seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary, Jacques Rancourt explores the complexities of faith, desire, beauty, and justice.

In his latest collection, Random Exorcisms, Adrian Louis writes poems with the rough-edged wit and heart-wrenching sincerity that make him one of the seminal voices in contemporary American poetry.

Katie Bickham's poems, set on a Louisiana plantation from 1811 to 2005, speak through the imagined voices of slaves, masters, mistresses, servants, and children. Focused on events that take place in a single room within the plantation home, she offers an unflinching portrayal of the atrocities that form an undeniable part of Louisiana's history.

In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs. Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike and prismatic.

A father and son shovel snow; a boy accidentally sets himself on fire; two boys fish for bluegill; a young drag queen returns home to die. At the centre of it all, a teenage boy's suicide resonates through the lives of those closest to him. The poems in this collection describe a place where mundane events neighbour the most harrowing.

The poems that make up Brian Swann's rich and constantly rewarding book Snow House are muscular and masterful. He has a marvelous ear and the ability to write poems that move insistently forward to a lovely and offhand resolution.

Takes the reader on a journey into the nature of place. Written out of a vanished suburban landscape, Matthew Cooperman's book, part navigational trope, part metaphor of embodiment, enacts the complex weave of identity as a series of places, lovers, influences, and natural objects.

Ryan Flaherty pays particular attention to linguistic slippages and etymologies as he examines the persistent difficulties of language and love in his latest collection, What's This, Bombardier? Alternating between self-deprecating humor and striking images, wry wordplay and a sense of awe at the beauties and absurdities of the world, these poems construct a postmodern play on the foundation of sadness, wonder, and longing. The combination is smart, fun, and ultimately heartbreaking--an exciting, extraordinary debut.

Takes up the tradition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, but on poetry's own terms. At first glance, Baggott's candid counsel can be seen as a manual on writing poetry, written in poems. As the book unfolds, however, these poems take on the larger landscape of love and loss, the rigours of living fully.

"Pacific Shooter is a book of transformations as insubordinate and subversive as Ovid's Metamorphoses - and with all the taste and twang of a new language. The bourgeois reader will hate it: there's too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss." - Susan Mitchell, from her judge's citation.

Reflects on personal, social, moral, and historical terror. These ambitious, imagistic poems move through subjects of violence and loss that are both deeply personal and elegantly public. Alessandra Lynch's poems are tactile and visual, coining wordsand phrases in surprising ways.

Takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Kathleen Jesme's poems explore the hidden, the provisional, the silent - that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.

This poetry collection takes the reader on a journey through life as it explores such subjects as marriage, family and sex. Written in several voices, from husband and wife, brother and sister, young and old, the poems remind us that paradise "doesn't invite us back".

In this astounding debut, Prufer reminds us of the fragility of life in a world where "everything's / the chance for flying / failing somehow", and loss is the hardest truth of all, "the body blooms, unfolding / then is gone."

"With Lure, Nils Michals extends to us a world of radiant detail, sometimes the world feels painfully beautiful, and eerie inner song. Moving between quietly charged description and sweeps of anguish and abrupt joy, Michals is always aware of how his attention treads on the landscapes and people it follows." - Joanna Klink

The poems in this volume probe the intersection of private and public history and visit the way stories are told.