The Fire in All Things

Selected by Richard Howard from almost one thousand entries, Stephen Yenser's The Fire in All Things is the most recent recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, given annually by The Academy of American Poets to honor an outstanding collection of verse by an American poet who has not previously published a book-length collection. The poems in The Fire in All Things are as intricate as vines that intertwine and twist around the trunk of a tree; yet high though the poems climb, each has its roots in the natural world, and in the heart. Ruins, architectural and emotional, fill these poems even as the language restores itself in puns, internal rhymes, and slant rhymes. The Fire in All Things reveals a poet of mature talent - shrewdly observant of the world around him, possessed of a keen wit and a formidable command of the language.