In Richard Hoffman’s long, complex title poem, which anchors his concerns throughout the book, he says with characteristic lucid candor, “…now when longevity itself begins to seem at once/the only wealth worth having and the booby prize.” It should be noted that Noon until Night is not a book about noon until evening. Yet the…
We know much of what happens when we break atoms apart. Yet how much of that human history can the human voice carry? Even the flesh is an agglomerate of unstable atoms, leaking secrets.This book and its sound pieces show us how the poem, itself rattled by atomic shifts, can carry our shadows. What’s left,…
Barrow Street 2015 Prize Winner “I was born with a gift for gall and grit,” Rochelle Hurt writes—a line that echoes through every poem in this collection. She spares nothing and bares all that needs baring about family, place, and relationships—how they reflect each other, blurred in tarnished mirrors. With a Sylvia Plath-like abandon and…
The Dear Remote Nearness of You speaks poetry’s origin in new and startling ways. This is the precise intelligence that knows it must step carefully across the light on the surface of the water… These poems form the contiguous dance of language choosing its own body at will, traveling across light and the dimensions of…
The dark eroticism that inhabits Miguel Murphy’s Detainee becomes eerily familiar as each startling poem explores the urges, the instincts, and the passions that bare their teeth—”what is love without arrows?” Human nature’s private hues are visceral and violent, sensual and predatory, and Murphy’s provocative verse dares to imagine them undisguised, as if to tell…
Barrow Street 2014 Prize Winner Danielle Deulen borrows the title of Montaigne’s essay for her extraordinary poetry book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Both philosophical and anecdotal, Deulen’s poems are slippery pronouncements of our ever-allusive present which is co-opted by nostalgia for our past “ancestor utterly naked, rock damp beneath her bare feet”…
Lesley Wheeler’s Radioland is a spellbinding examination of communication breakdown in all its guises. With seismic heft, Wheeler mines the metaphoric capabilities of tectonic shifts and fault lines, slurred pop lyrics, and the lexicon of new technologies. Throughout, a father’s inscrutability translates into the nonsensical garble and static of old radios. Wheeler’s keen focus on…
The poems of Kevin McLellan’s highly accomplished first collection are haunting and elliptical but never oblique or encoded. Lightning flashes of insight, memory, elegy, and stern self-reckonings illuminate the horizons of these poems, which are unsettling and ecstatic by turns. These are the poems of ‘polysemy without mask’ that Paul Celan strove to write, and…
Doug Anderson stretches and shakes, snorts and sweats like a horse in a muddy field. From the scar tissue of the Vietnam War, to the family plot in Kentucky, to the voice of the Mississippi River, Anderson mines a deep vein where ‘all our nakedness comes back to us.’ There’s history and humor in this…
These “big themes” rest quietly within Soraya Shalforoosh’s uniquely charming poems, where office friendships, births, marriages, and deaths take place in the still-thrilling city and in this poet’s always clear, always loving, constantly surprised and surprising imagination. Bracing as any New York novel, these poems sing the right-here, right-now. —Kathleen Ossip
Barrow Street 2013 Prize Winner Lovely does not suffice, nor does lyric. Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as…
At the center of this fabulous tale of the human heart a tale at once historical, scientific, musical, literary is a wrenched lyric cry, the cry of a particular woman in a particular place, the place uncharted, the woman floating between the remembered ecstasies of youth and the unforeseen rigors of age: I break my…
He has had the skill and courage to confront, absorb, and renew our poetic tradition at its most vital. —Harold Bloom Few poets could sustain, as Corn does, both the fiery voluptuousness of the abstract oracular passages, and the broken simplicity of the late 20th-century voice, tentative, self-conscious, unheroic. —Wayne Koestenbaum
Barrow Street 2012 Prize Winner “[F]ragments—my/specialty,” writes Page Hill Starzinger in her compelling first book, Vestigial, and, indeed, the title implies the book itself is a remnant. But if Vestigial is fragmentary, (“leavinges/and fragmentes…etched and eroded…”) it is a flood of fragments. This is a vivid, dynamic, and muscular collection whose poems seem able to…
Wreck Me is a primer of emotional violence—a primer because, as these unassumingly gorgeous poems know so well, we can only be beginners when we confront our wish to be seized, transported, remade….”We love / that ravishment,” says Sally Ball of what we simultaneously fear and crave, “we trust it.” These poems are ravishing. —James…
New and Selected Poems Irish emigrant poet Mairéad Byrne’s provocative and unhinged You Have to Laugh showcases, for the first time in one volume, more than twenty years of groundbreaking poetry that ranges from taut lyrics, sustained narratives, prose and occasional poems, to high-wired sound texts. Byrne’s brash energy, wry quips, and engaged bittersweet critiques…
Barrow Street 2011 Prize Winner Frank Montesonti’s wit reminds me of the Depression, when all the great novelists wrote dialogue for movies. He can be as glib as the blonde bomb-shell in a 1930s suspense film or as deadpan as the morose sidekick. Not only will he help dump the body, he’ll add the necessary…
The very title of this fourth volume of Hightower’s verse, we are told, is Ben Franklin’s revision of Jefferson’s proposed opening of a famous document which originally characterized “these truths” as sacred, but which cool-headed Ben changed to self-evident. Perhaps there is some savor of Jesus in these breathtaking poems after all. Read ’em and…
If Anton Chekhov returned as a modern-day poet, Richard Hoffman would be his name. His poems reverberate with the same lucid witness and precision. Bridging histories local and cultural, they draw on literary traditions while simultaneously heralding experiment and invention. Both rooted and transcendent, Emblem is a marvelous new book. —Terrance Hayes
Barrow Street 2010 Prize Winner Mechanical Fireflies is the perfect collision of James Wright’s anti-pastorals with Wallace Stevens’s meditations on the real. —Kathy Fagan
In Matthew Frank’s brilliant collection of new poems, it seems all the patents on reality are evaporating beyond a mere novelty of image or music into another idea about things that are original and memorable—it’s like H.D. is here insisting, finally, that knowledge has soured, happily, into wisdom. —Norman Dubie
Barrow Street 2009 Prize Winner For philosopher Michel Foucault, “heterotopia” designates a real or imagined space of escape, transformation, or revelation. In Lesley Wheeler’s prizewinning second collection, the heterotopia is Liverpool, England, during the middle of the twentieth century—a time and place defined by the Blitz and the privations that followed. Her imaginary Liverpool, however,…
This Noisy Egg makes us consider a new world constructed by an intrepid “I” armed with her own brand of sassy humor. —Cole Swenson
Barrow Street 2008 Prize Winner Open Black Leapt In to any poem for the thrill of finding a poet of eerie energy breaking new ground. These pages are full of unexpected images, passionate energy, and entirely new ways of making the homely, heartbreaking world as beautiful and odd as it deserves to be. The lines…
Barrow Street 2007 Prize Winner Ely Shipley’s Boy with Flowers won The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry at The Publishing Triangle’s 2009 Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards at the New School in New York City, on May 7, 2009.
Barrow Street 2006 Prize Winner In October 2009, The New England Poetry Club selected Gold Star Road for the Sheila Motton Award for the best book of poetry published in the past two years! Please see http://www.nepoetryclub.org/
Barrow Street 2005 Prize Winner “The man who shoots/at another man has forgotten/what the student who sits all day/is trying to remember.” Will someone please place this book on the steps of the White House? The poems of Stan Sanvel Rubin move with unobtrusive delicacy and deep grace through the mysteries of time and being….
Barrow Street 2004 Prize Winner In the provocative, finely wrought and, at every turn, original poems of Annus Mirabilis, Sally Ball examines the human impulse to know-to master a thing by knowing it-and to make of mastery and knowledge a clean equation. A bracingly keen observer of human nature, Ball uncovers the limitations of that…
Christine Scanlon was born in New York City in 1971 and, except for a brief time in Montréal, has lived there ever since. She received her MFA from The New School, and is currently doing graduate work in literature at The City University of New York. A Hat on the Bed is her first book.
Barrow Street 2002 Prize Winner With Selah Joshua Corey joins a generation of exciting first-book poets (Jennifer Clarvoe, Joanie Mackowski, Cate Marvin come to mind) who apply the fundamental poetic gift of the ear, in new ways. Sheer richness of language, and in the best poems cadences layered like those of Wallace Stevens, guide the…
Evelyn Reilly lives in New York City and writes poetry, as well as text for museum exhibits on historical and cultural subjects. She received a degree in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Writing Program at Columbia University. Her literary work has appeared in ACM,…
Lois Hirshkowitz, who lives in New York City, is a founding editor and trustee of Barrow Street, has taught at the Writer’s Voice in New York City, and has worked as a New Jersey Poet-in-the-School and as a Dodge poet. In 1973 she founded an independent day school, Lakewood Prep, which she still ‘attends.’ She…