Winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize
Eryn Green’s Eruv is the latest winner of the oldest annual literary award in the United States, which originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty. Green joins an esteemed roster of past winners that includes Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Hass, and as Carl Phillips, competition judge and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, points out, this collection “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented.”
Taking its title from the Hebrew word for a ritual enclosure that opens from private into public spaces, Eruv includes poems of love, sadness, and pathos while celebrating the power of ritual and untamed landscapes. Just as a larger home can be fashioned out of communally shared alleyways and courtyards, with passages enabling movement from one world to another, Green’s poems provide a similar doorway into a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Eryn Green received his Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of Utah. His work has appeared in Jubilat, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver, CO.
“Green invites us to join his party; he opens to the door wide. Here is a poet we hope to see again.”—Library Journal
“Driven by sound, the poems accumulate line by line, each registering a discrete impression while continuing to unfold a sustained thought.”—Publishers Weekly I am standing on the freeway and cars move by like drunk panthers I am loved again like there was future again—
—from “Sounds (Second Walk)”
“In American character, there is an interval between Vision and Prophecy, during which time the deepest poems first find themselves aloud. Eryn Green literally phases that interval straight across spellbound pages. These poems show character alight. They show a continent its names.”—Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems
“Make the whole neighborhood your house, and then allow the wholeness of the universe to become your shining shelter. Eryn Green’s poetic brilliance extends our sense of home, of our being at home in the universe.”—Bin Ramke, author of Aerial
“These poems, filled with and discharging light, are open-voiced trajectories tracing the energy fields that extend around the human figure. They are the lighted path not to the exit but to the opening door, their motion the very figure of outward—alive, in love, moving through the passageway with the hope of the lyric. We don’t come to our senses, but to the open-hearted word bursting out toward the world.”—Eleni Sikelianos, author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead
Sign up for updates on new releases and special offers
Shipping Location
Our website offers shipping to the United States and Canada only. For customers in other countries:
