Books in the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets series

Exactly a century ago, the Armory Show brought European avant-garde art to New York. Among the works on view was Marcel Duchamp's notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, which a derisive critic wanted to rename 'Explosion in a Shingle Factory'. Both titles come to mind as one reads Chris Hosea's Put Your Hands In.

Playfully invading the traditional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems in Sex at Noon Taxes mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body.

In his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence.

In this debut collection, Eyes, Stones, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The unusual voice encountered in Curses and Wishes carries a quiet, slightly elevated conversational tone, which flows from intimate secrets to wider social concerns. The short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sings.

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate.

A spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee "up to his hips in love" who "will fall asleep in the snow" and "wake up still kissing his flower."

Alice Fulton, the judge for the 1998 Walt Whitman Award, calls Once I Gazed at You in Wonder "quite simply, the most endearing book I've read in some time." Readers of this audacious and, yes, endearing collection will agree.

Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities.

Alison Hawthorne Deming brings to her first collection of verse the kinds of scrupulous observation and clear-eyed analysis that characterize scientific inquiry as well as a poet's eye for the telling moment.