APR Honickman 1st Book Prize – serie

"This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the Introduction

Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.

"Tomáaacute;s Moríiacute;n's poems are as infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne, and as skeptical and addicted to history-as-fable as Zbigniew Herbert."—Tom Sleigh, from the introduction

"An energetic and moving book of fantasias and elegies."—Edward Hirsch

Selected from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tomás Q. Morín's debut is rich with the mastery of Morín's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of the American southwest, these poems are bold and brightly imagined.

From "Castrato":

What do you call a gifted sopranowith no balls who is too uglyto play the heroine, is never tall enoughfor the role of the hero? Wait a quarter centuryand you can fast forward past the floggings,the endless sermons, the giggles under alderswith curious girls, busted noses, carpedsisters with chubby boys, the innumerablenights of sleeplessness. Better to skip all thisunpleasantness and descend the last risetoward the coast where you can stroll the docksin the short light of winter, get lostin the cloudbank, let the sea ripenin your hair, scan the flat waterfor the handsome young men . . .

Tomás Q. Morín was born in Texas and educated at Texas State University and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in San Marcos, Texas, and teaches at Texas State University.

"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on fire." —Fanny Howe, from the introduction

House and Fire is a mother's love song to her stricken young son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery, whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward, California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood. This unforgettable debut was selected by Fanny Howe.

From "House and Fire":

for thirty-three years

I didn't make anything

with my body

and thenyour brother

and thenhe sickened

watching him sleephooked to tubes

an empty envelopeinside me

fills each dawnwith one long love letter

by night

it's mostly apology

A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Maria Hummel is the author of two novels and poetry and prose in Poetry, Narrative, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California.

Fanny Howe has written many books of poetry, and her Selected Poems (UC Press, 2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

“Gregory Pardlo . . . wants to explore the druidic function of art, the works of jazz musicians, painters, poets, and others who live imaginatively, expand reality, and make imagination free.”—Brenda Hillman, from the introduction

Totem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is the debut of a poet who has been listening for decades. In his youth, Gregory Pardlo heard stories of factory hours and picket lines from his father; in the bars, clubs, and on the radio he listens to jazz and blues, the rhythms, beats, and aspirations of which all of which seep into his poems.

A former Cave Canem fellow, Pardlo creates work that is deeply autobiographical, drifting between childhood and adult life. He speaks a language simultaneously urban and highbrow, seamlessly switching from art analysis to sneakers hung over the telephone lines. Deeply rooted in a blue-collar world, he produces snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.

From “Vincent's Shoes”:

On the wall above my desk: a pen and ink affair which I copied from a print hanging in the sushi bar down the block: inflected necks of pedestrians on a bridge in the rain and here I hung the hightops from a power line. It was in me to do. I felt it in my gut the way Vincent might have felt the wheat fields and the smoking socket of the sun rattling, tweezed days late into the ear of an aluminum bowl

Gregory Pardlo teaches at Medgar Evers College, The City University of New York, and lives in Brooklyn.

Selected by Marie Howe from over one thousand submissions, Nine Acres is the winner of the American Poetry Review/APR Honickman First Book Prize. Taking their titles from chapters of a 1930s small-scale farming handbook, the fifty-two poems in this cycle create a handbook for living and explore sustainability on many levels—on the land, in the family, and in the spirit.

As Marie Howe writes in her introduction to the book, "Nathanial Perry has collected poems into this book as one plants a field, as an act of husbandry: each line a furrow where seeds flourish or fail. Husbandry—to create a dwelling place and to care for it—these are the ancient acts."

"Soil Surface Management"

I spent the afternoon breakingground. The tiller bucked and groanedat the job, but with each pass I sawa perfect blankness, like I'd been loaneda second life in which to growa third. The sun sat on its porchand smiled. I wondered if the dirtwould be enough, a kind of torchto set inside our lives to say,we'll grow our food like this, our planswill look like this —like soil squaredand measured into beds by a mansweating through his shirt with effort.In dirt is one life we can chooseto make. I spent the afternoonbreaking what I knew we'd use.

Nathaniel Perry lives with his family in rural southside Virginia. He is the editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review and teaches at Hampden-Sydney College.