Poetry Prize Winning Books
PRIZE WINNING COLLECTIONS
2006
Dawn Lundy Martin, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering
Selected by Carl Phillips
The University of Georgia Press, $16.95
A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering is a long song of bodily bereavement—staccato, bracket studded, gruff, brusque. It maps a stark, disconsolate landscape in which bodied resounds with bloodied, 'a song no longer a song.' Jagged vantage, rhythmic aplomb, and an always agile colloquy of image and assertion make for a most auspicious debut. —Nathaniel Mackey
2005
Constance Quarterman Bridges, Lions Don't Eat Us
Selected by Sonia Sanchez
Graywolf Press, $14
Constance Quarterman Bridges gives readers the gift of the griot’s embodied eloquence, memory working to delicately braid the fibers of a family’s connected lives. The core of the African-American tradition has been waiting for this book. — Afaa Michael Weaver
2004
Amber Flora Thomas, Eye of Water
Selected by Harryette Mullen
University of Pittsburgh Press, $14
Amber Flora Thomas has written one of her generation's best first books. 'We are invented / by what we let pass through us,' Thomas says, and a sensory world passes through her poems-regal, yet warm, majestic and domestic, sophisticated, emotional, and wise. Intensely crafted, Thomas's poems thrive on multiple levels of truths in myriad angles. They are literally dazzling. Thomas makes a breathtaking debut with this collection. — Molly Peacock
2003
Kyle Dargan, The Listening
Selected by Quincy Troupe
The University of Georgia Press, $14
What is this phat new thing in your hands? It's both antithetical and wide, wide open. It's right as mismatched sneakers: one foot stepping backward, the other forward. Kyle Dargan has built a shelter with the bricks of the best worlds. He's made a halfway house you won't be leaving soon. Settle in! — Terrance Hayes
2002
Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question
Selected by Kevin Young
Graywolf Press
Here’s a voice that can weave beauty and terror into one breath, and the unguarded revelations are never verbal striptease. — Yusef Komunyakaa
2001
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Black Swan
Selected by Marilyn Nelson
The University of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95
A series of dramatic portraits: the landscape of a Florida landscape too hot to touch, the mother’s Pentecostal Old Testament law of judgment, a father’s recklessness in the mindless spreading of seed, male malingering with no meaningful work, and little instruction by example. . . . Ecstatic lyric, ritual grace under extreme pressure, realized. — Michael S. Harper
2000
Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn
Selected by Al Young
The University of Georgia Press, $16.95
Major Jackson makes poems that rumble and rock. These poems find themselves at home in the mind of Sun Ra or on a Cape Cod beach, in a City Center Disco or the projects of North Philadelphia. Read 'Euphoria,' 'How To Listen,' 'Some Kind of Crazy' and get a jolt of this stuff. Become one of the 'community of believers.' — Dorianne Laux
1999
Natasha Trethewey, Domestic Work
Selected by Rita Dove
Graywolf Press, $12.95
From sonnets and traditional ballads to free verses shot through with the syncopated attitude of blues, the poems in Domestic Work sing with a muscular luminosity. Here is a young poet in full possession of her craft, ready to testify. To which I say: Can we get an ‘Amen?” And: Let these voices be heard. — Rita Dove, Judge