Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry – Serie

This collection of poems explores wayfaring, both in a spiritual sense and in the sense of knowledge navigation in an information age. It explores American history, encompassing writing and identity in the figures of Emily Dickinson and Willard Gibbs, the country's first mathematical physicist.

Breeze, winner of the 2003 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, exudes a material and musical sensibility, informed as much by the sound of a word as it rolls off the tongue as by the ideas it may trigger. In these carefully crafted poems, John Latta traces the process of language attempting to align its measure against the amplitude of the world. His writing recognizes the futility of representing the world while braving the caprice of trying to do so. Made of image, invention, and music, the poetry of Breeze challenges and inspires.

Breeze, winner of the 2003 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, exudes a material and musical sensibility, informed as much by the sound of a word as it rolls off the tongue as by the ideas it may trigger. In these carefully crafted poems, John Latta traces the process of language attempting to align its measure against the amplitude of the world. His writing recognizes the futility of representing the world while braving the caprice of trying to do so. Made of image, invention, and music, the poetry of Breeze challenges and inspires.

Ned Balbo's Sandeen Prize-winning collection of poetry seeks a voice for contemporary and historical figures as they face the ecstasy and grief of love. In these assured and powerful poems, Balbo's confidence in lyric, narrative, and dramatic forms is always evident: lovers whirl in Dante's circle, saints suffer for their faith, and characters from Hitchcock films are caught in traps of their own making.With energy and insight, Balbo gives us Alice Liddell's last word on Lewis Carroll's infatuation, a Victorian heroine who uncovers a wax museum's hidden crimes, and a bestiary where courtship rituals are both savage and redemptive. Lives of the Sleepers explores the connections of men and women across the centuries, and interrogates those patterns that always reassert themselves. These sleepers are joined in a dialogue that transcends any one era. The joy of their connection and the grief of their separation also reflect the history of our own age.

Ned Balbo's Sandeen Prize-winning collection of poetry seeks a voice for contemporary and historical figures as they face the ecstasy and grief of love. In these assured and powerful poems, Balbo's confidence in lyric, narrative, and dramatic forms is always evident: lovers whirl in Dante's circle, saints suffer for their faith, and characters from Hitchcock films are caught in traps of their own making.With energy and insight, Balbo gives us Alice Liddell's last word on Lewis Carroll's infatuation, a Victorian heroine who uncovers a wax museum's hidden crimes, and a bestiary where courtship rituals are both savage and redemptive. Lives of the Sleepers explores the connections of men and women across the centuries, and interrogates those patterns that always reassert themselves. These sleepers are joined in a dialogue that transcends any one era. The joy of their connection and the grief of their separation also reflect the history of our own age.

The poems in Juan Luna' s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress. Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial power. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero Jose Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World's Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility. Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria's poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.

With a salve in one hand and a burcher's knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen prize in Poetry. The prose poems and sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet's ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life--and language—are worthy pursuits; but they never offer up easy assurances about the benefits of humanity to anyone or anything. Get ready for dogs that wail and overtake the scene; an invitation to make love on a mattress of ants; and the philanthropist of the title, who dreams that people are tuned into fish. It's "good luck and bad in random but equal measure," Kaplan writes in "Life and Times."

The poems in Manuel Paul López's The Yearning Feed, winner of the 2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the U.S.-Mexico border. López, an Imperial Valley native, considers La Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies play out on a daily basis. These poems synthesize López's knowledge of modern and contemporary literature with a border-child vernacular sensibility to produce a work that illustrates the ongoing geographical and literary historical clash of cultures.With humor and lyrical intensity, López addresses familial relationships, immigration, substance abuse, violence, and, most importantly, the affirmation of life. In the poem titled "Psalm," the speaker experiences a deep yearning to relearn his family's Spanish tongue, a language lost somewhere in the twelve-mile stretch between his family's home, his school, and the border. The poem "1984" borrows the prose-poetics of Joe Brainard, who was known for his collage and assemblage work of the 1960s and 1970s, to describe the poet's bicultural upbringing in the mid-1980s. Many of the poems in The Yearning Feed use a variety of media, techniques, and cultural signifiers to create a hybrid visual language that melds "high" art with "low." The poems in The Yearning Feed establish López as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry, one who challenges popular perceptions of the border region and uses the unique elements of the rich border experience to inform and guide his aesthetics.

No Messages, the 2001 winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize, is Robert Hahn's second major collection of poetry. In commenting on Hahn's collection All Clear, Richard Howard called attention to Hahn's ability "to ground his perceptions, his discoveries in a specific circumstance . . . to reach the risen condition, the state beyond, which is the purpose of all his poems."Howard's analysis anticipates the poems of No Messages, which focus on particular places and characters while they progress, through motions of the mind and maneuvers of language, toward a "state beyond," which involves a reformulating or a reseeing—reconfigurations of an apprehended world through language and form.In its exploration of the seams and the seamlessness of language and reality, No Messages is an apt introduction to the new millennium. The "no messages" of the title reflects a basic tension in contemporary poetry, between its claim to exist in the realms of language and structure, and its sense of responsibility to render the world in its actuality, in a clarified or confronted state. A striking balance of this tension is found in the collection's central section, a suite of poems responding to the influence of James Merrill.While No Messages is devoted to revisionings of the world in language, it remains grounded in circumstance and place and in the actions and convictions of historical figures. The book opens with John Knox on the beach at St. Andrews in Scotland and closes with John Brown on the bank of the Pottowatamie River in Kansas. Between these two shores, No Messages describes a series of luminous arcs connecting this world and the world beyond.

The title poem—about a group of schoolchildren illustrating Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark"—ends with the following assertion: "these are the only / lessons they will ever need to learn: that life / is not artifact, but aperture—a stepping into / and a falling away; that to sing is to rise / from the grave of the body. And still / say less than nothing." This idea of the aperture, the gap, the silence that exists between what we want to say and what we actually do say pervades The Curator of Silence. The paradox, of course, is that the creation of art itself makes this gap, as there is always a gulf between the impulse and the gesture, the vision and the poem. Nutter's experience of living for two months in the Antarctic, perhaps the greatest silence and solitude possible on earth, is the archetype of silence whose many dimensions she explores in this volume. She considers both literal, obvious silences—death, abandonment, loneliness, the silence into which lost things vanish—and silences of a more mysterious and paradoxical nature: the (mis)perceptions of childhood, the erasures of addiction and brain damage, the isolation of Antarctic explorers, and the seemingly distant, and often fearsome, lives of animals.In the end, this great silence we batter our hearts against—call it the grave or god or the universe or the intimate silence of the white page—is the silence these poems are singing to and with, not against.

We encounter many voices in life: from friends and family, from media, from co-workers, from other artists. In a highly connected global world, where people and entities are electronically enmeshed, we filter these voices constantly to get to what we determine to be the truth. Taking inspiration from pop culture, politics, art, and social media, Martin Ott mines daily existence as the inspiration and driving force behind Underdays.Underdays is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other. Within many of the poems, a second voice, expressed in italic, hints at an opposing force "under" the surface, or multiple voices in conversation with his older and younger selves—his Underdays—to chart a path forward. What results is a poetic heteroglossia expressing the richness of a complex world.

Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.

Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.

The wildly unrestrained poems in Splinters Are Children of Wood, Leia Penina Wilson's second collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, pose an increasingly desperate question about what it means to be a girl, the ways girls are shaped by the world, as well as the role myth plays in this coming of age quest. Wilson, an afakasi Samoan poet, divides the book into three sections, linking the poems in each section by titles. In this way the poems act as a continuous song, an ode, or a lament revivifying a narrative that refuses to adopt a storyline.Samoan myths and Western stories punctuate this volume in a search to reconcile identity and education. The lyrical declaration is at once an admiration of love and self-loathing. She kills herself. Resurrects herself. Kills herself again. She is also killed by the world. Resurrected. Killed again. These poems map displacement, discontent, and an increasing suspicion of the world itself, or the ways people learn the world. Drawing on the work of Bhanu Kapil, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Wilson's poems reveal familiarity and strangeness, invocation and accusation. Both ritual and ruination, the poems return again and again to desire, myth, the sacred, and body

The wildly unrestrained poems in Splinters Are Children of Wood, Leia Penina Wilson's second collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, pose an increasingly desperate question about what it means to be a girl, the ways girls are shaped by the world, as well as the role myth plays in this coming of age quest. Wilson, an afakasi Samoan poet, divides the book into three sections, linking the poems in each section by titles. In this way the poems act as a continuous song, an ode, or a lament revivifying a narrative that refuses to adopt a storyline.Samoan myths and Western stories punctuate this volume in a search to reconcile identity and education. The lyrical declaration is at once an admiration of love and self-loathing. She kills herself. Resurrects herself. Kills herself again. She is also killed by the world. Resurrected. Killed again. These poems map displacement, discontent, and an increasing suspicion of the world itself, or the ways people learn the world. Drawing on the work of Bhanu Kapil, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Wilson's poems reveal familiarity and strangeness, invocation and accusation. Both ritual and ruination, the poems return again and again to desire, myth, the sacred, and body

Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna's third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author's own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the "other" and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna's third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author's own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the "other" and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

The poems in Auto/Body are an inexhaustible engine—sometimes a body, sometimes flesh—a sensual exploration of what it means to repair, to remake, to keep going even when rebuilding feels impossible.From the greased-up engines of auto body shops to the innumerable points of light striking the dance floor of a queer nightclub, Auto/Body, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, connects the vulnerability of the narrating queer body to the language of auto mechanics to reveal their shared decadence.Behind the wheel of this book is an insistent, humorous voice whose experiences have lent themselves to a deep, intimate knowledge of survival, driven by the pursuit of joy and exalted pleasure. Raised in and near auto body shops, Vickie Vértiz remembers visiting them to elevate the family car to examine what's underneath, to see what's working and what's not. The poetry in this book is also a body shop, but instead we take our bodies, identities, desires, and see what's firing. In this shop we ask: What needs changing? How do our bodies transcend ways of being we have received so that we may become more ourselves?From odes to drag, to pushing back on the tyranny of patriarchy, to loving too hard and too queer, to growing up working-class in a time of incessant border violence and incarceration, this collection combusts with blood and fuel. In other words, Vértiz writes to dissolve a colonial engine and reconstruct a new vessel with its remains.

The poems in Auto/Body are an inexhaustible engine—sometimes a body, sometimes flesh—a sensual exploration of what it means to repair, to remake, to keep going even when rebuilding feels impossible.From the greased-up engines of auto body shops to the innumerable points of light striking the dance floor of a queer nightclub, Auto/Body, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, connects the vulnerability of the narrating queer body to the language of auto mechanics to reveal their shared decadence.Behind the wheel of this book is an insistent, humorous voice whose experiences have lent themselves to a deep, intimate knowledge of survival, driven by the pursuit of joy and exalted pleasure. Raised in and near auto body shops, Vickie Vértiz remembers visiting them to elevate the family car to examine what's underneath, to see what's working and what's not. The poetry in this book is also a body shop, but instead we take our bodies, identities, desires, and see what's firing. In this shop we ask: What needs changing? How do our bodies transcend ways of being we have received so that we may become more ourselves?From odes to drag, to pushing back on the tyranny of patriarchy, to loving too hard and too queer, to growing up working-class in a time of incessant border violence and incarceration, this collection combusts with blood and fuel. In other words, Vértiz writes to dissolve a colonial engine and reconstruct a new vessel with its remains.

The title poem—about a group of schoolchildren illustrating Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark"—ends with the following assertion: "these are the only / lessons they will ever need to learn: that life / is not artifact, but aperture—a stepping into / and a falling away; that to sing is to rise / from the grave of the body. And still / say less than nothing." This idea of the aperture, the gap, the silence that exists between what we want to say and what we actually do say pervades The Curator of Silence. The paradox, of course, is that the creation of art itself makes this gap, as there is always a gulf between the impulse and the gesture, the vision and the poem. Nutter's experience of living for two months in the Antarctic, perhaps the greatest silence and solitude possible on earth, is the archetype of silence whose many dimensions she explores in this volume. She considers both literal, obvious silences—death, abandonment, loneliness, the silence into which lost things vanish—and silences of a more mysterious and paradoxical nature: the (mis)perceptions of childhood, the erasures of addiction and brain damage, the isolation of Antarctic explorers, and the seemingly distant, and often fearsome, lives of animals.In the end, this great silence we batter our hearts against—call it the grave or god or the universe or the intimate silence of the white page—is the silence these poems are singing to and with, not against.