The Lesser Fields

Winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by James Longenbach “Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi, who gave him the courage to look at almost nothing for a very long time, Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation our world, the world of human mortality feel like […]

One Sun Storm

Winner of the 2008 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Martha Ronk “Endi Bogue Hartigan’s poems are enveloping: one is immersed in experiences of ice drifts, orange peels, and the striving toward a clarity (Let us be clear, one poem reiterates) that crystallizes and then evaporates. Subjects and objects are beautifully combined and confused through […]

Carrier Wave

Winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Lyn Hejinian About the Book: “This, Jaswinder Bolina’s first major volume of poetry, is a brilliant invention. With a delight that in no way denies the desperateness of the palimpsested circumstances in which the world is embedded, Bolina bears witness to ‘the crooning / of […]

Frayed escort

Winner of the 2005 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Cal Bedient About the Book: “Frayed escort puts a speedboat motor in the avant of avant-garde and immediately enters strange waters. Evading every opportunity to be obvious and tedious, the poetry somehow skips beyond even the need to be subtle: it is simply un­imaginably imaginative […]

Whethering

Winner of the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Forrest Gander About the Book: “In agile lines that canyon-open, exposing an unfashionable, edgy sinceritas, Rusty Morrison explores the intertwining of life and language in quiet, gorgeous meditations inflected by barn swallows. Whethering leads us into a shapely attentiveness to those particular others—human, animal, vegetal—that […]

Goldbeater’s Skin

Winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Donald Revell About the Book: “The poetry of G. C. Waldrep is a prolific liturgy, intense and conversational by turns. And the turning is telling; it comes round right. Bright idioms become bright branches, and the branches become the further architecture of Word. Christopher Smart […]

Chemical Wedding

Winner of the 2002 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Fanny Howe About the Book: “These poems are unconventional, deep, independent, un-American, all-American, hip, tragic, observant, skitterish, critical, political, crushed, brushed, funny. It is the range of motion and emotion in them that makes them matter.” — Fanny Howe, final judge and author of Selected […]