Bøker i Miller Williams Poetry Prize-serien

In the same way that the speaker in these poems often seems itinerant, lacking a place or person to call home, the poems themselves have their own roaming quality. The reader is moved somewhere unexpected, the poems seem to shapeshift or suddenly beckon from somewhere else, or they may zoom into focus.

"Finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams poetry prize selected by Patricia Smith"--Cover.

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati's Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet's uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, "You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what's missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong." Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

"In 'The Trouble with Light,' Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. Largely set in the poet's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Clark's portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection"

"'When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,' writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss"--Provided by publishe

Madeleine Wattenberg's debut collection alternates between epistolary poems to the mythical figure Io and lyrical interrogations of science, myth, and the historical record. Wattenberg casts Io - the priestess of Hera who was turned into a heifer - as a woman struggling to navigate the terrain between choice and coercion.

Craig Blais's Moon News deploys the sonnet form to treat subjects as diverse as Gregor Samsa, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the cosmos. Here the form's capaciousness is engaged to full effect.

Haunted as much by place and people, landscapes and distant figures, as by the possibilities of image-making itself, Eternal Sentences is a song for the hidden depots of rural America.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins.

Inspired by Matsuo Basho's writings and teachings on poetics and haiku, the interrelated lyric poems in Sky of Wu investigate work and marriage, becoming a parent while watching a parent age into dementia, and the realities of wrestling with inequality, pollution, and habitat loss while navigating everyday life in Oakland, California.

In a series of persona poems, Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of Americans whose lives have been predominantly ignored by contemporary mainstream culture, revealing the everyday heartbreak and beauty experienced by people living at the periphery of the nation's consciousness.

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeYa Te Veo takes as its title the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem to capture and nourish themselves on a diverse cast of would-be passers-by, drawing their life-force from the resulting synthesis of characters. Among the seized are poets and painters alongside musicians from Garth Brooks to Wu-Tang Clan to the composer Morton Feldman, whose mysterious personality serves as a backdrop in many poems for meditations on intimacy, ethics, and anxiety.As the phrase "e;ya te veo"e; ("e;I see you"e;) implies, this is a book interested in revealing what we think is hidden, in questioning the gap inside all of us, a gap between what we feel and what we say and do, making space for our many contradictions.Like the works of Feldman, these poems focus and recede, experimenting with form in order to accomplish a state of deep concentration. They impersonate sonnets, ghazals, terza rima, monologues, translations, and freestyles, but inexactly, embracing failed imitation as an opportunity to remix the familiar.

These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism's failure to assuage human loneliness, the speakers in these poems find joy in shared meals and glasses of wine, and use moments of mutual attention to challenge notions of class in America.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins.

Winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize edited by Billy Collins.