Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets – serie

Chosen from over a thousand manuscript submissions, Misterioso is steeped in the biographies, history, and sounds of jazz music, using a distinctly American idiom to explore personal relationships. Whether writing about John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk (the inspiration for the book's title), Feinstein transcends mere portraiture by emphasizing the meditative and sonorous qualities of jazz music. Feinstein's insistent voice and music are a welcome addition to contemporary American poetry.

"Feinstein links memory, feeling, autobiography, official history with imagination the same way recording engineers ingeniously mix, shape, and color sound....It is bloood and kin, eruptions and rushes of love, scratches of silence--sometimes barely audible between beats--that make these walking, talking poems leap to life and burst into flame."-Al Young

"Feinstein's debut merits the first Hayden Carruth Emerging Poets Award because the poems in it are good, sturdy work and because so many of them touch on one of Carruth's passions, jazz....Feinstein writes excellently about other things--his mother's death, cremations he has witnessed, his love for his Asian wife and their children--but the jazz poems uniquely communicate what it is like to live with music one adores."-Ray Olson, Booklist

Sascha Feinstein, winner of the first annual Hayden Carruth Award, has published poems in numerous magazines and journals, such as American Poetry Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. He is the co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set, and the author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. He is an Associate Professor of English at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program and edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.

Winner of the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets.

Rebecca Wee's award-winning debut is a moody and lyrical mosaic where the reader is presented multiple and simultaneous points of reality. As line after line gathers details from the world, Wee's poems build in momentum, give voice to the silenced, and explore the poet's impulse to create art that transcends suffering.

Rebecca Wee is a professor of creative writing at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. A former editor of The Minnesota Review, she earned her MFA from George Mason University and has received several awards for her poetry.

Pont des Arts

She's bent in a posture of anguish or prayer in a spot of city filth.

Head down, a stained knit cap with a few coins on the ground beside her, and her pliant child, a shadow.

Someone veers past with a friend in a clamor of rings and scarves. A pretty child skips after them, scattering pigeons.

The mothers miss how their daughters' eyes catch them-- the wary, openmouthed stares.

A terrible knowledge passes between them, the bridge rippling under their feet,

before the polished child rushes past but looks back at the one on the bridge in the heat--

the sunblown silent one whose hand has pulled back and flown up to smooth, for a moment, her heavy hair.

The Philosopher

A man rides a bicycle into town. He's forgotten his clothes, or maybe this is what he means to do. He rides carefully into the burning town.

Apartments of old stone list, iron balconies, awnings, the window-grates blacken with heat. He rides by.

His lip perspires, his eyes intent. In the hills behind him there is a glow that is not the burning. The Acropolis maybe. The Dome of the Rock.

The man has a book under his arm. The pages are gilt-edged, the title has worn away. He has a shoulder-wound also, an old crescent scar. Now his chest sweats, now his abdomen. He is more agile than laughter.

The road turns. A black sedan rounds the corner behind him. They are leaving town or they're trailing him.

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.

Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility.

Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award Radio Crackling, Radio Gone is a debut collection of poetry that explores multiple logics of perception, association, and interpretation. Navigating the edges where things begin to disappear, the poems inhabit border zones of transformation where memory slides into imagination, wakefulness meets sleep, and things possessed become lost. 

What seemed a mystery wasin fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.What seemed a memory was in facta dividing line. Insert bird for wind.Insert wind for departure when everyoneis standing still. . .

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone was selected from the 1,200 submissions to the Hayden Carruth Award. By the time the anonymous manuscript was chosen as winner, the cover sheet was filled with readers' commentary: "stunning" and "lovely" and a bold "YES!"