Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry – serie

Using a variety of measures, the author's meditations attempt to re-enact the grain of consciousness as it plays out, from elegy to simple joy.

Presents a collection of poems.

Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the cornfields, but as she promises, 'nothing happened'. In the fields, in the woods, in the dark water of Ohio, something is happening. Girls disappear, turn on each other. Men watch from the rear view as the narrator hedges, changes her mind, then shows all in this break-out collection of bittersweet and cataclysmic lyrics.

With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus bears witness to the pain, the fear, and the flimsy mortality that births our humanity as well as the hope, humour, love, and joy that completes it. This book will appeal to sons and fathers, to parents and children, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, to those who think that poetry has sealed itself off from the living world, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language.

Trying to make sense of a disordered world, Stefanie Wortman’s debut collection examines works of art as varied as casts of antique sculpture, 19th-century novels, and even scenes from reality television to investigate the versions of order that they offer. These deft poems yield moments of surprising levity even as they mount a sharp critique of human folly.

In his debut collection, Jordan Windholz recasts devotional poetics and traces the line between faith and its loss. Other Psalms gives voice to the skeptic who yet sings to the silence that ""wells with the noise of listening"". If faith is necessary, this collection suggests, it is necessary as material for its own unmaking.From (psalm):part self, part songthe psalm drags sense from absencethe eclogue anticipates responseverdant and vined, its vergesovertake the tongue. . .

Bernard A. Booker, wry old Maine codger andunofficial mayor of Ell Pond, is the subject ofBooker’s Point, an oral history-inspired portrait-inverse.Weaving storytelling, natural history, and thepoetry of place, the collection evokes the sensibilityof rural New England, meditations on home andelders, and above all, the pleasures of a good story.From “Some Kind of Hunter”He coaxed a pregnant woman right acrossthe river, and it weren’t no easy bridge.A cousin of an in-law, broke as dirt,she come up visiting from Vermont too poorto buy a license. Booker paid it, seta rifle in her hands, and took her upto Perkinstown, the brook side, where they comeupon this bridge, just beams and cables, rough.Full six months big, a borrowed gun; to her,that span, it looked like one hell of a stunt“Grumbling is subtle, conjures the natural worldrichly and convincingly, and her subject matter issurprising and intriguing. I also admire how shehandles meter. Nobody else that I know of is writinglike her.”—Morri Creech, judge and author of Sleepof Reason

In this debut collection, Anna Lena Phillips Bell explores the foothills of the Eastern U.S., and the old-time Appalachian tunes and Piedmont blues she was raised to love. With formal dexterity—in ballads and sonnets, Sapphics and amphibrachs—the poems in Ornament traverse the permeable boundary between the body and the natural world.

The poems in James Najarian’s debut collection are by turns tragic and mischievous, always with an exuberant attention to form. Najarian turns his caprine eye to the landscapes and history of Berks Country, Pennsylvania, and to the middle east of his extended Armenian family. These poems examine our bonds to the earth, to animals, to art and to desire.

Owen McLeod's extraordinary debut maps the contours of an ordinary life: the rise and fall of romantic love, the struggle against mental illness, and the unending quest for meaning and transcendence. Ranging from sonnets and sestinas to experimental forms, these poems are unified by their musicality, devotion to craft, and openness of heart.From ""All Saints' Eve""From a La-Z-Boy abandonedon the basketball court, I watchedyou light up the KFC, part trafficfor the rush-hour ambulance, raiseweeds from asphalt cracks, cause rainto come down like Adidas on me,mofo of infinite faith. Treeswere your fingers, not prints or clues.Never were you uppercase with me.

This poetry collection is the record of an American's return home after a decade abroad, an exile imposed solely because he loved another man. In a virtuoso display of lyric and formal inventiveness, Bellin-Oka's poems meditate on the myriad losses engendered by diaspora: of home, family and sexual identity, and spiritual certainty.'Steve Bellin-Oka's poems hold in balance an intensified language and a passionate voice that bring together the struggles of the inner life with stark realities. This is a book of arresting authenticity.' - Peter Balakian, Pulitzer-Prize winner and judgeFrom 'Self-Portrait as the Chosen One'Long before I was what I am now, shortof breath, bald, just returned with arthritic kneesfrom exile in another country's muck and redvolcanic soil, too near-sighted to discernthe High Plains tumbleweed from the burningbush of myth, scorched now and silent,long before this, I was the first son my mother borethat lived.

This collection's title - as in tether, strike, eyelash, welt - is a nod to the fluidity of language and the foolish penchant we have for naming things, including ourselves. The poems refuse to navigate, choosing instead to face head-on the snares of gender, patriarchy, and parenting. In the closing environmental poems of farewell, the speaker regains communion with nature through the ageing body.

“There are some poets we admire for a mastery that allows them to tell a story, express an epiphany, form a conclusion, all gracefully and even memorably— yet language in some way remains external to them. But there are other poets in whom language seems to arise spontaneously, fulfilling a design in which the poet’s intention feels secondary. Books by these poets we read with a gathering sense of excitement and recognition at the linguistic web being drawn deliberately tighter around a nucleus of human experience that is both familiar and completely new, until at last it seems no phrase is misplaced and no word lacks its resonance with what has come before. Such a book is Austin Segrest’s Door to Remain.”— Karl Kirchwey, author of Poems of Rome and judge“Segrest’s formal ingenuity holds out the hope of order amidst the increasingly illegible chaoses of human love.”—Kimberly Johnson, author of Uncommon Prayer “. . . a life study for the new century.”—Amy Newman, author of On This Day in Poetry History

In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert’s eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling the irresistible pull of water—what Melville called “the ungraspable phantom of life.”

This collection is a record of one man’s navigation of loss, addiction, and labor. At once a meditation on the allure of a legacy in self-destruction and a giving over to hope, Felling is an exploration in honesty. Rendered in direct language and through clear eyes, this book, as its title indicates, is concerned with tensions of agency, creation, and destruction— upward and downward motion.  “After the 1940 publication of Native Son, Richard Wright shared some of his stylistic goals in the novel. ‘I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now,’ he writes, ‘like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen. Action follows action, as in a prize fight.’ Kelan Nee’s poetry delivers the immediacy and punch that Wright demanded of literature. Nee has the head for poetry, the heart for poetry, and above all, the guts. This debut collection holds back nothing and leaves me reeling with high hopes for Nee’s future in the craft.”—Gregory Fraser, judge and author of Designed for Flight and Answering the Ruins

Chance of Lightning is a precarious love letter that wagers mystery against easy answers and unflinching vulnerability against inevitable misfortune. Sonnets, prose poems, and experiments in lyrical verse create a world of imaginary lottery winners—from a man who invests his windfall in a dove-release business to a woman who tracks down every person she’s ever kissed—and explore themes of birth, death, loss, and survival.