Strange Wood contains verse remarkable for its fearless insight. The first poems in this lush, lyrical collection are populated with infants and adolescents, while the middle section gives way to bewildered, misguided adults, who are futilely attempting to understand and conquer the myriad difficulties of modern life. The last poems are concerned with deaths ― in the family, in history, and in the abstract. In this astounding debut, Prufer reminds us of the fragility of life in a world where “everything’s / the chance for flying / failing somehow,” and loss is the hardest truth of all―“the body blooms, unfolding / then is gone.”

Strange Wood: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Literature & Fiction

Prufer, Kevin D.

Poetry

Pleiades Press

Remarkable for their dark, sharp wit, their stylistic unity, and their combination of sweetness and risk, the poems in The Light in Our Houses probe the intersection of public and private history, and visit the way stories are told: “what we have named history / was once only the braided rivers / of people’s lives, currents that brimmed / fast and dangerous, then emptied / into the wide blank spill of ocean.” Voicing a disdain for conclusions ― “the gaudy clothes we wrap narrative in” ― Al Maginnes writes poems that carry the weight of parables.

The Light in Our Houses: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Maginnes, Al

A Sacrificial Zinc impels the reader on a journey into the nature of place. Written out of a vanished suburban landscape, Matthew Cooperman’s book ― part navigational trope, part metaphor of embodiment ― enacts the complex weave of identity as a series of places, lovers, influences, and natural objects. The landscape itself is beautifully particularized as the desert and mountain spaces of the American West, and the flora and fauna of the Pacific Rim. From “the blue Pacific exactly the color of cold” to “the magnolia leaves [of California] / in the first scuttle of fall,” these lovely poems ground a journey in that “little better thing than earth.”

A Sacrificial Zinc: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Cooperman, Matthew

“With Lure, Nils Michals extends to us a world of radiant detail―sometimes the world feels painfully beautiful―and eerie inner song. Moving between quietly charged description and sweeps of anguish and abrupt joy, Michals is always aware of how his attention treads on the landscapes and people it follows.” ―Joanna Klink

Lure: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Michals, Nils

In Motherhouse, Kathleen Jesme takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Jesme's poems, which investigate religious life in a convent in the 1960s, are assembled from many fragments: juxtapositions of place and time (childhood and novitiate), shifting scale (the minuteness of an "old beige comb from home," the boundlessness of a "three-axled God"), and varying poetic forms. Jesme explores the hidden, the provisional, the silent -- that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.An intensely lyrical work, Motherhouse is a cloth woven from disparate voices and structures, expressing both the deep divisions of the self and the longing for a whole that may be ultimately shaped.The convent, then prairie: stretchesitself across the Great Plains,grabs the bank of the Red River of the Northin one handand the Rockies in the otherand pulls: you can seeuntil your sight failsnothing elseis in the waywhere something other should bethere is only your darkeningsightresistancelike bone, filleted clean in the windwhich comesfrom everywhereFrom Motherhouse by Kathleen Jesme. Copyright 2004 by Kathleen Jesme. All rights reserved.

Motherhouse: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Jesme, Kathleen

"The poems that make up Brian Swann's rich and constantly rewarding book Snow House are muscular and masterful. He has a marvelous ear and the ability to write poems that move insistently forward to a lovely and offhand resolution. The long and sinuous sentences that make up this collection range over the natural world, memories, and myths -- and, like 'a kind of semiotic stuntman,' Swann merges these subjects with the poems ostensibly describing them, so that you suddenly realize that you are being pulled along by a song 'that mirrors itself with you in the middle / doing much of the mirroring.' And yet in the end the world of the poems retains its fierce independence, the independence of 'the world which could be you but isn't, ever, quite.'" -- John Koethe, from his judge's citation "Brian Swann is our poet of the primal present.... Snow House is a profound poetry that wakens us and helps us identify our sublime and perilous location." -- William HeyenThe scraps, bright, all of them, these small birds, as if torn from the sunnow bloody-mouthed, then a broken line moving closer, brant -- no,blue geese, and in synapses all round swamp-sparrows, as blades of lightpush in till the last one takes over so masks drop from stones andon the headland windowpanes are morning swollen and a wave curveslike gravel along the long bay where no hull moves so it all startsto look a little contrived, as if the boats had gone out to seas on cue, and hidden.Here you find yourself shattered at a thousand points, flashing like crabs, a leg here, a claw there, and eyes everywhere. -- "Manitu Bay"

Snow House: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Swann, Brian

“Part primer, part credo, part arm-swinging gambol, this wonderful book is resonant with wit and insight.”―Linda Bierds
 Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees takes up the tradition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, but on poetry's own terms. At first glance, Baggott's candid counsel can be seen as a manual on writing poetry, written in poems. As the book unfolds, however, these poems take on the larger landscape of love and loss, the rigors of living fully, and the intricate, mysterious territory of our fragile, hardworking souls.

Compulsions of Silk Worms and Bees: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

BAGGOTT,JULIANNA

"Pacific Shooter is a book of transformations as insubordinate and subversive as Ovid's Metamorphoses -- and with all the taste and twang of a new language. The bourgeois reader will hate it: there's too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss." -- Susan Mitchell, from her judge's citation"Susan Parr's poetry is an orchestra of rim-shots and flashbang intimacy. 'Wind a sheet around all,' she croons in this vivid collection, 'then bring into the dark this beatific twill.' Her poems pop and vibrate on armatures of spiked sonics and an intellect that twirls with dazzling humor. Awash in verbal intimacies, Parr never forgets to mean, and in doing so she's turned up the potency -- a needle of her verse has a laser's power. Pacific Shooter is the playful sweetness in our last breath, and in these pages, Parr will 'afford you / the machine: the logomotive yo-yo. Go man,' her poems clap. 'Go: yo, yo.'" -- Alex Lemon

Pacific Shooter: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Parr, Susan

"I swear Kevin Clark's Self-Portrait with Expletives is the book I've have been waiting to read -- the book in which the past and present are not strangers, but lovers. Clark's ecstatic poems time-travel with alacrity on their quest for transformation and song. Intimate, hilarious, attentive, political, Self-Portrait with Expletives is a mature, commanding book by a poet confident in his craft. It's also a book with a wide and wonderful boyish grin." -- Denise Duhamel "From these pages flows a warm and breathy voice that sings up the Tuscan countryside but also traffics in the quiddities of hardscrabble Americana: beers drunk, cars wrecked, guns fired, songs sung, lovers kissed and missed. It's as though there's nothing this voice can't say; it's personal, provocative, and I want to hear it again and again." -- David Kirby

Self-Portrait with Expletives: Poems

Clark, Kevin

Ryan Flaherty pays particular attention to linguistic slippages and etymologies as heexamines the persistent difficulties of language and love in his latest collection, What's This, Bombardier? Alternating between self-deprecating humor and striking images, wry wordplay and a sense of awe at the beauties and absurdities of the world, these poems construct a postmodern play on the foundation of sadness, wonder, and longing. The combination is smart, fun, and ultimately heartbreaking -- an exciting, extraordinary debut.

What's This, Bombardier?: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Flaherty, Ryan

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