Books in the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry series

In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Hard Damage charts the intergenerational damage caused by war, environmental loss, and the collective grief of exile.

In this prize-winning poetry collection, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them.

In a world of war and displacement, illness of the mind and body, imprisonment and violence both historical and personal, the poet leads her readers through a landscape of loss. In unadorned language, she draws readers into the interplay between articulation and silence - and finally offers a vision of redemption.

In Kara Candito's prize-winning debut collection a ""garish/human theatre"" comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the ""glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves"" and Puccini's Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, this collection examines the depths of nature and culture (how, for instance, "gar" in Old English means "spear," and an octopus can lose a limb during mating) to give form to the darkness and the light that make us human.

A powerful and unflinching sort of documentary poetics. This collection bears elegiac witness to the effects of global politics on individual lives. Shane Book's poems carry us to Uganda, Ghana, Mali, Trinidad, and Canada's west coast; from a religious sacrifice in Tarahumara, Mexico, to Book's ailing grandfather's bedside.

For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist's wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep.

"A little voice sings/from the back of the auditorium/of my throat. Aren't all of us/waiting to be discovered?" Here, the poet's answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but tuned to the incidental music of daily life.

From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes's new collection sew together stories of dislocation and loss, of survival and hope, of a world patched together by a family over five generations of diaspora.

Whether exploring the porous borders between sin and virtue or examining the lives of saints and mystics to find the human experiences in stories of the divine, the poems in No Confession, No Mass move toward restoration and reunion.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Gubernat's The Zoo at Night reflects on the dark side of love, death, the family romance, carnality, and lofty aspirations with subtle craft. She thinks of her poems as ""night thoughts"" resembling nocturnes, in which ""a bit of light leaks in.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance, at turns funny, tragic, and haunting, reflects on the author's experience emigrating as a child to the United States from Ukraine in 1991.

Ramsey's collection is wise and funny, allusive and deeply felt