Bøger i Miller Williams Poetry Prize serien

"Wager, Adele Elise Williams's raucous debut, celebrates the fearlessness and determination that can be wrested from strife. Early on, Williams confronts multiple challenges, both personal and communal, including persistent childhood anxieties and stunning neighborhood tragedies ("Ray down the street hung / himself like just-bought bananas needing time"). In the working-class communities she moves among, the poet tangles with her perceived failures as a wayward daughter, recovering addict, and skeptical scholar as she buries friends and lovers along the way"--

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.

"'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"

"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.

"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.""--

"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"--

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.

Craig Blais's Moon News deploys the sonnet form to treat subjects as diverse as Gregor Samsa, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the cosmos. Here the form's capaciousness is engaged to full effect.

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.

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeYa Te Veo takes as its title the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem to capture and nourish themselves on a diverse cast of would-be passers-by, drawing their life-force from the resulting synthesis of characters. Among the seized are poets and painters alongside musicians from Garth Brooks to Wu-Tang Clan to the composer Morton Feldman, whose mysterious personality serves as a backdrop in many poems for meditations on intimacy, ethics, and anxiety.As the phrase "e;ya te veo"e; ("e;I see you"e;) implies, this is a book interested in revealing what we think is hidden, in questioning the gap inside all of us, a gap between what we feel and what we say and do, making space for our many contradictions.Like the works of Feldman, these poems focus and recede, experimenting with form in order to accomplish a state of deep concentration. They impersonate sonnets, ghazals, terza rima, monologues, translations, and freestyles, but inexactly, embracing failed imitation as an opportunity to remix the familiar.

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.

Inspired by Matsuo Basho's writings and teachings on poetics and haiku, the interrelated lyric poems in Sky of Wu investigate work and marriage, becoming a parent while watching a parent age into dementia, and the realities of wrestling with inequality, pollution, and habitat loss while navigating everyday life in Oakland, California.

In a series of persona poems, Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of Americans whose lives have been predominantly ignored by contemporary mainstream culture, revealing the everyday heartbreak and beauty experienced by people living at the periphery of the nation's consciousness.

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.

The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard's Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theatre, brotherhood, labour, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard's poems move from Wisconsin to New York and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family.

These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism's failure to assuage human loneliness, the speakers in these poems find joy in shared meals and glasses of wine, and use moments of mutual attention to challenge notions of class in America.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins.

Winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize edited by Billy Collins.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins.