Bücher der Reihe Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus bears witness to the pain, the fear, and the flimsy mortality that births our humanity as well as the hope, humour, love, and joy that completes it.

Trying to make sense of a disordered world, Stefanie Wortman's debut collection examines works of art as varied as casts of antique sculpture, 19th-century novels, and even scenes from reality television to investigate the versions of order that they offer. These deft poems yield moments of surprising levity even as they mount a sharp critique of human folly.

In this debut collection, Anna Lena Phillips Bell explores the foothills of the Eastern US, and the old-time Appalachian tunes and Piedmont blues she was raised to love. With formal dexterity - in ballads and sonnets, Sapphics and amphibrachs - the poems in Ornament traverse the permeable boundary between the body and the natural world.

This poetry collection is the record of an American's return home after a decade abroad, an exile imposed solely because he loved another man. In a virtuoso display of lyric and formal inventiveness, Bellin-Oka's poems meditate on the myriad losses engendered by diaspora: of home, family and sexual identity, and spiritual certainty.

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."--Eleanor WilnerBetween us, how we wrestle over words Strain to wring some blessing from the silence, Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure, The tyranny of names: night day, Sable and alabaster, flint shale, Steel and lace. Who among us can afford To speak the language--any language--rightly? As if it weren't enough to bear one heart Eternally divided in its chambers? We stand close enough to touch. We do Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire, A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.

The poems in James Najarian's debut collection are by turns tragic and mischievous, always with an exuberant attention to form. Najarian turns his caprine eye to the landscapes and history of Berks Country, Pennsylvania, and to the middle east of his extended Armenian family. These poems examine our bonds to the earth, to animals, to art and to desire.

In poems celebrating survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert's eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling the irresistible pull of water-what Melville called "the ungraspable phantom of life." His poems return again and again to rivers, lakes, and the sea, there to find "a universe that loves the dark," one that "bears you up as if you had no weight.""Ernest Hilbert's Storm Swimmer is a gleaming cornucopia of dreams, nightmares, tenderness, and grace. In Hilbert we encounter the poet as allegorical realist: a seer who has 'known beauty almost impossible / To believe, nearly always lost amid / All the usual distractions.' This is a rare book both willing and able to capture the wide and relentless range of the human condition, in its varying lights and shadows, and in settings spanning the mundane, the tawdry, and the sublime. Storm Swimmer is a book of great feeling and of great technical skill. Everything in it is sacrificed for poetry, which is why everything in this beautiful book lives."-Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Heaven and judge"In Storm Swimmer, fatherhood is neither one-dimensional nor short-sighted; instead, fatherhood is a nexus, rigged with grace and curiosity-an enduring gift for a son and for readers. Toggling between the natural world and the relentless spectacle of contemporary life, acutely aware of the passage of time, Ernest Hilbert's poems are marvelously built, resonant."-Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems"Ernest Hilbert has always written from the ragged edge between tradition and the present moment, and now he goes for a deeper immersion, a swimmer in life, aware of its most desperate and beautiful currents. The sea has taught him to ride out the detritus of existence, to see it but not be consumed by it, and his forms give spine to his vision. Storm Swimmer is his strongest book so far, urgent and real."-David Mason, author of Pacific Light