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Firsts
A masterfully curated collection, drawn from a century of works in the acclaimed Yale Series of Younger Poets The Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Its winners include some of the most influential voices in American poetry, including Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Forché, and Robert Hass. In celebration of the prize's centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Year of Blue Water
Winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self‑guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi’s poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.
Walking Toward the Sun
divdivIn 1936, twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Today, more than sixty years later, he retains that distinction. Yale University Press here reintroduces Edward Weismiller—now the oldest living Younger Poet—with the publication of his latest book of poetry. Weismiller’s is “a talent that has kept faith with itself and its sources,” says W. S. Merwin, current judge of the Younger Poets Series. In Walking Toward the Sun, youthful lyricism has given way to plainness of speech—even spareness. These poems are honest and unflinching, always striking in their prosody. They will remind some readers of Yeats, for they convey nobility in the face of old age, infirmity, and disappointment. Weismiller sings powerfully about a world of loss, but he is never grim or despairing. The poet in old age remains hopeful, open to possibility, and always aware of beauty in the smallest places. /DIV/DIV
Mothman Apologia
This volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age "Elegiac and witty."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2022" "These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land."--Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Robert Wood Lynn's collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia's famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state's mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.
What Noise Against the Cane
The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets is a lyrical and polyvocal exploration of what it means to fight for yourself “Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.” —Carl Phillips, from the Foreword The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey’s “poems argue for hope and faith equally. . . . These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance.”
It is Daylight
Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins' emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gl ck observes, "I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute." Gl ck calls Collins' volume "savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable."
Crush
This collection about obsession and love is the 99th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.
The Solace Is Not the Lullaby
Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention comprise this 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets The hollow more than shape is certain. The 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets features Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention to the human and natural worlds. Series judge and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips notes, "Osier's is a sensibility unlike any I've encountered before--the poems here are thrilling, and strangely new." In his foreword to the collection, Phillips writes, "Certain mysteries--most of them--remain mysteries in an Osier poem." Despite this, Osier's poetry--distinguished by its brevity, precision, and restraint--offers what Phillips describes as feeling "incongruously (dare I say magically?) like closure, a steady place to land."
Slow Lightning
Announcing the newest winner of the oldest annual literary prize in the United States
One Way to Reconstruct the Scene
Richard Hugo has selected William Virgil Davis's One Way to Reconstruct the Scene as the 1979 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his foreword to the volume Hugo says: "William Virgil Davis is a poet who, when he writes, contends with a loving self who wants to render the world as found. His battle is the classic one, the memory versus the imagination. . . . 'Memory is the first property of loss, ' Davis tells us, and that may be true. At least it is worth considering. Certainly a scene, no matter how initially unattractive, reconstructed lovingly in active language posing as passive recall is a true property of gain. Davis believes in and works to create a world we can humanely attend the second time around, and his poems often provide that second chance."
