Brittingham Prize in Poetry – serie

A son is born early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life's other horizon. These poems use language which is dense and clear, playful and sombre, with an emotional amplitude which is suggestive of Behn's own musical training.

A son is born early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life's other horizon. These poems use language which is dense and clear, playful and sombre, with an emotional amplitude which is suggestive of Behn's own musical training.

Winner of the 2002 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, this collection explores the gestures of hurtfulness and compassion. Whether set in a shelter for battered women, in the midst of a political demonstration, or at the centre of an orchestra, the poems pursue the place of language in an injurous world.

In a masterful blending of lyric and narrative, Sea of Faith ranges across interior states and external worlds. From the Sierra Nevadas to New York City subways, from an imagined friendship with Lao Tzu to a meditation on Coney Island, from a comic and poignant classroom discussion to a sexual fantasy, John Brehm's poems explore the human predicament with tenderness, compassion, and humor.

Betsy Andrews' sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America - past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs - under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age.

From tumult to catharsis, the poems in Philip Pardi's first collection, ""Meditations on Rising and Falling"", explore the emotional tug-of-war that is the human experience. Present at every turn are people searching for meaning and sense in an elusive world: a doorman who plans to punch the senator who never speaks to him, a son who discusses ornithology with his father's dying friend, a roofer who copes with his past as he senses his imminent fall to the ground. While the poems are witness to the turmoil of both body and soul, they are not without hope. Pardi finds grace in noise, and happiness in the mourning doves, showing us that often, the reasons for disbelief become precisely the reasons for belief. Pardi's collection is a testimony to faith and resistance in a world where ""falling is the given.""""Tonight, the uneven darkness is equal parts bold and apologetic. It's the shabby moonlight epiphanies are made for, but I'm not due for an epiphany. I'm due for something lower in my body, something akin to the warming of hands by a mug of something hot."" - excerpt from ""God's Shins"".This work is by [copyright] The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

Bird Skin Coat is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent - doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars - this collection reflects Sorby's keen eye for blending images. As they shuttle between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, these poems explore how the radical instability of the world is also the source of its energy. The woman he hit is still 42. She notes with wonder how her parka fits her perfectly the way a dove's skin holds the whole bird together. 'Fate is not a thing with feathers, it's old, bald, and blind, a pope who can't decipher the man's name, David Pratt, as he scrawls it on scratch paper' - excerpt from ""Bird Skin Coat"" [copyright]. The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature's forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar is anchored by an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish scattered among the barber's sweepings, and the players at ""the most dangerous playground in the world"" prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the now-beyond, the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time.

Winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye.The word “tyrant” carries negative connotations, but in this new collection, Joanne Diaz tries to understand what makes tyranny so compelling, even seductive. These dynamic, funny, often poignant poems investigate the nature of tyranny in all of its forms—political, cultural, familial, and erotic. Poems about Stalin, Lenin, and Castro appear beside poems about deeply personal histories. The result is a powerful exploration of desire, grief, and loss in a world where private relationships are always illuminated and informed by larger, more despotic forces.