Books in the Iowa Poetry Prize Series series

These poems rush the reader into the urgency of feelings - lovelorn, bawdy, grieving, pleading - but, never self-pitying. Each poem turns upon and returns to the infuriating and glorious correlations between love and art (learning to love, trying to make beauty or art, trying to be a beauty).

Julie Hanson's award-winning collection, Unbeknownst, gives us plainspoken poems of unstoppable candour. They are astonished and sobered by the incoming data; they are funny; they are psychologically accurate and beautifully made.

On the surface, L.S. Klatt's poems are airy and humorous - with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub - but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word.

Here, the author confronts the slipperiness of language and perception as she probes natural processes - the lives of insects, the uncertainty of love and the deaths of human beings. The poems negotiate between desire for something irrefutable and an uneasy bedrock of paradox.

Reading like one long odyssey, the author takes the reader on his many adventures which range from the ludicrous to the life-threatening with Carlyle flying into the light and carrying the reader with him on his perplexing and fanciful journey.

In a startling and original poetic voice, Megan Johnson in The Waiting reveals a vigilant young person who has suffered an unmentionable loss and who dismantles and reconstitutes lyric modes in a relentless search for solace. A lyric adventure of grief and search, The Waiting reinvents language from raw materials, driven by intense emotional need.

Embraces the possibility that we can learn as much from objects as we can from other people, from the inanimate as much as the animate. This work reveals what the world is like when your attention is focused elsewhere, when your head is turned the other way.