This is a set of poems (each with the word “poem” in its title) unpretentiously calling the nature of poetry into question. These are small, brilliant, desperate songs, each skewed yet accurate. Foust discovers the uncanny with every turn of phrase. I might say these poems are a kind of (black) magic, but Foust says: […]
Winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Allen Grossman About the Book: “Sally Keith’s gift to us is an experience of the world rich and intensely present to mind: simple because fully known, as if for the first time; and also complex because profoundly analyzed, not by means of abstraction but by […]
Winner of the 1999 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Jorie Graham About the Book: “In this beautiful debut volume, Stephen Burt, in poetic actions that range with unusual ease from prose to sonnets and free verse, explorers the sensation of selfhood as it presents itself, in all its fractured parts, for re-formation. His speaker […]
Winner of the 1998 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Mark Strand About the Book: “There is a Wordsworthian grandeur about Michael White’s poems, a rhetorical and emotional fullness that is breathtaking. His attention to the shifting complexity of the natural world, his precise diction, his finely tuned cadences carry with them an unusual power, […]
Winner of the 1997 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Jane Miller About the Author: Catherine Webster is a poet, teacher, and third-generation California farmer who lives in the San Joaquin Valley. Her book of poems The Concept of Bodily Objects was also published in 1997. She has edited Handspan of Red Earth: An Anthology […]
Winner of the 1996 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Charles Wright About the Author: Bruce Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1992. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Spirituals and The Creation, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal Award in […]
Winner of the 1995 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Charles Simic About the Book: “Although his work comes out of the poetries of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara and James Tate, Young has his own original voice. The language, the invention, the imagination, and the sheer fun of his poems is astounding. […]