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Announcing the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, North America's oldest annual literary prize.

This selection of poetry is accompanied by an introduction by George Bradley, the 1986 winner of the annual Younger Poets contest. The book is divided into two sections: "The Early Years", presenting the first 31 winners of the contest and "The Modern Series", displaying work by US poets.

This volume was the winner of the 1994 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

Winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize

Winner of the 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize

Originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award presented in the United States. Ansel Elkins's poetry collection, Blue Yodel, is the 109th volume to be so honored. Esteemed poet and competition judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her "e;arresting use of persona,"e; calling her poems "e;razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility."e; In her imaginative and haunting debut collection, Elkins introduces readers to a multitude of characters whose "e;otherness"e; has condemned them to live on the margins of society. She weaves blues, ballads, folklore, and storytelling into an intricate tapestry that depicts the violence, poverty, and loneliness of the Deep South, as well as the compassion, generosity, and hope that brings light to people in their darkest times. The blue yodel heard throughout this diverse compilation is a raw, primal, deeply felt expression of the human experience, calling on us to reach out to the isolated and disenfranchised and to find the humanity in every person.

This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs’s Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as “a book of exploration, of searching regard.... a grave, attentive holding of a light” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs’s experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave’s four- thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.

Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Glck observes in her foreword, Green Squall begins and ends in the garden; however, Hoplers gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyrichis gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hoplers work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevenss tropical extrapolations, there lies beneath Green Squalls lush tropical surfaces a terrifying world in which nightmare and celebration are indistinguishable, and hope is synonymous with despair.

A capsule of the imaginative life of the individual, Some Trees is the 52nd volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." After the publication of Some Trees, selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn't understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the century's most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashbery's oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealists--many of whom he translated--and abstract expressionism.

This was the winning volume in the 1991 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and contains poems by Nicholas Samaras. Samaras won a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1986, a Taylor Fellowship for study abroad in 1981-82 and a prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1983.

Features poems such as "The Hours of the Day", "First Poems", "Heroes", and "Notes from Greece". "The Hours of the Day" is a long meditative sequence set in Vermont; here the square-shaped poems become the crown glass windowpanes of the farmhouse itself.

A collection of poems by Craig Arnold. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures.

This collection of poetry was the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

We were at sea, together at risk, and he was a poor fisherman. He happened to fill the equation in the geometry of appetite I trace. And so you see it's not so much about the eye as whatever is made to serve the master who asks for wine, wants the pickled fruits de mer alongside the treatise on navigation and the maps that show what oceans hide.

In this first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and power.