Books in the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize series

In The Surface of the Lit World, Shane Seely draws on a wide range of sources-from personal memory to biblical narrative-to explore the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ways in which we make meaning of our lives. Seely delves into the ways in which family and environment shape us.

A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse.Golda Meir once said, Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, theres nothing you can do. The poems in Fleda Browns brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a childs terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation.Browns poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to lifes terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.

Joseph J. Capista's Intrusive Beauty reckons with reluctant ecstasy and the improbable forms that beauty assumes. In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one's life and one's livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one's vision of the world. Whether a young father who won't lower the volume on the radio or a Victorian farm boy tasked with scaring birds from seed-sown furrows, the inhabitants of Intrusive Beauty are witness to the startling ease with which one's assorted lives come in time to comprise a singular life. Mortality, love, duty, desire, an acute longing for transcendence: here, old themes resound anew as they're uttered in a multiplicity of forms and means, holding fast always to the heart.

In this, Julie Hanson's second award-winning book, the poems inscribe deep stillness on a world of harmonies in motion. Whether composed on modern objects, say a vacuum-"e;part pet, part sculpture/sprawled awkwardly, still shrieking"e;-that evokes a sudden onrush of sobbing, or the notional movement between a plastic bag, a lawn and a return from a France not yet visited, these poems circulate among the senses as moments that pass and are recalled.Hanson's poems investigate interiority as they resonate in the ear to excite the eye. Together, her poems illustrate the movement between and among seasons and tasks, work and leisure, solitude and people, and all through the private life as it intersects with the products and noises of industry and nature. Hanson's is a poetic realm that includes the head-splitting bright white screamings of an Indy 500 race into a zen garden, this realm we all inhabit where birdsong and squeaky water meters improvise together.

Includes poems that range from a four-line satire of office inspirational posters to a lengthy meditation on the silence of God.

This is the seventh collection of poetry by Kwame Dawes. It draws deeply on the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South, and is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence.

Addresses the possibility of political change in a nation that some in America consider part of the axis of evil. This book explores the effects of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 including censorship, execution, and pending war on the country as well as on his understanding of his own origins.

For Will Wells, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals - Albert Einstein, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother - to extract the personal value embedded there for him.

The poetry of Dan Lechay, collected in "The Quarry", constructs a myth of the Midwest that is at once embodied in the permanence of the landscape, the fleeting nature of the seasons, and the eternal flow of the river. He reminds us that nothing is more mysterious that the way things are.

A collection of Memye Curtis Tucker's poetry.

In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely.

Penumbra-Michael Shewmaker's debut collection-explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt. From intricate descriptions of the rooms in a dollhouse, to the stark depiction of a chapel made of bones, from pre-elegies for a ghostly father, to his compelling treatment of his obsessed, human characters (a pastor, a tattoo artist, a sleepwalker, to name only a few), these are poems that wrestle with what it means to believe in something beyond one's own mortality. Learned and formally adept, these poems consist of equal parts praise and despair. They announce Shewmaker as an important new voice in American poetry.

In her second collection of poems, Jennifer Rose writes primarily of places and displacement. Using the postcard's conventions of brevity, immediacy, and, in some instances, humor, these poems are greetings from destinations as disparate as Cape Cod, Kentuckiana, and Croatia.

On the Desire to Levitate is the first collection of poems by Alison Powell. This striking collection includes vivid, unflinching meditations on aging, mythology, poetry, and family.

In Solving for X, his award-winning collection of new poems, Robert B. Shaw probes the familiar and encounters the unexpected; in the apparently random he discerns a hidden order.

In Animal Purpose, Michelle Y. Burke explores the lives of men and women as they stand poised between the desire to love and the compulsion to harm. In one poem, a woman teaches a farmhand the proper way to slaughter a truckload of chickens. In another, a couple confronts the recent loss of a loved one when a stranger makes an unexpected confession in a crowded restaurant. Set in both rural and urban spaces, these poems challenge received ideas about work, gender, and place. Danger blurs into beauty and back again. Burke scours the hard edges of the world to find "e;fleeting softness,"e; which she wishes "e;into the world like pollen that covers everything."e;

Presents the collection of poems. This book meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women.

The Palace of Bones by Allison Eir Jenks is an often stark and startling vision of the way we live, the places we inhabit, and the relics we make to comfort ourselves. Haunted by a quiet, unquenchable longing, Jenks expertly and calmly guides the reader through a vivid dreamscape in this first full-length collection of poems.

In choosing the winning manuscript for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, judge Andrew Hudgins remarked: "With immense poetic verve, Pelizzon finds flamboyance in places where it has been forgotten and brings it back to vivid life--and she sees it for what it is.

About the author of this award-winning collection, final judge Miller Williams commented: "Meredith Carson writes poems so well-controlled in tone that the language of conversation takes on an elegance rarely found in contemporary poetry, but emphatically contemporary."

In Joshua Mehigan's award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line.

Taking the warp of dream, sometimes nightmare, and weaving it with the ordinary world, the poems of The Armillary Sphere, Ann Hudson's award-winning debut collection, do not simplify the mystery but deepen it.