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2023 – Cindy Juyoung Ok, Ward Toward
Armantrout says: “Cindy Juyoung Ok is a wonderfully inventive poet with a command of her craft. She writes in many forms, some invented, but her constant impulse is to break the frame, to escape oppressive containments. She pushes constantly against the social norms that have sometimes trapped her, writing with startling frankness about mental wards, domestic abuse, and racial stereotyping. Her impulse is to shake things up. Using dream material, sound play, puns, and grammatic instability, she shows that there is always more than one way to make sense, as she elegantly argues at the end of ‘The Five Room Dance’: ‘a closed round, the words we cross a swarm / from which I am wrung. As I, wrong, form.’”
2022 – Mary-Alice Daniel, Mass for Shut-Ins
Of her second selection since being named judge of America’s longest-running poetry prize, Armantrout says: “This book should come with a warning—and it does, with three in fact. The first section opens with the generic symbol for caution; the second with the warning sign for radioactivity; the third with the biohazard symbol. Is Mass for Shut-Ins this scary? Almost—and only partly because it explores such topics as serial killers, plague, slavery, and the nature of hell. Against humans creating hell on earth, Daniel draws on animistic, Islamic, and syncretic Christian traditions from her native Nigeria to unleash potent incantations, rituals and spells, electric as St. Elmo’s fire. This is Flowers of Evil for the 21st century. Buckle up.”
2021 – Robert Wood Lynn, Mothman Apologia
“Robert Wood Lynn has written about tragedy without either grand-standing or giving in to self-pity. The Mothman has always been an equivocal messenger. Here he begins to doubt his own existence as soon as he scans the internet (much as anyone deep in a ‘flyover’ state might do). It’s possible to compare this work with John Berryman’s Dream Songs or with documentary poetry like Salient by Elizabeth T. Gray. As a reader, I was often surprised, even engrossed, and never once bored! How often can you say that?,” said new judge Rae Armantrout.
2020 – Desiree C. Bailey, What Noise Against the Cane
Series judge Carl Phillips says: “Bailey wrestles with how history can make of the self an exile from itself; the poems here work like shifting maps, each an attempt to make a way back to that self, and then past it—which is to say, the poems argue for hope and faith equally, despite fears that ‘I will always be/out of body, I will always fall//outside the lines,’ despite realities like the fact ‘that Trayvon [will] not be avenged.’ These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance: ‘I will not go mad. I am vessel,’ Bailey insists; ‘my hands are the scarlet ibises/soaring the salt-washed dawn/cleaving the sky open like a blade.’”
2019 – Jill Osier, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby
“Osier’s is a sensibility unlike any I’ve encountered before—the poems here are thrilling, and strangely new,” said judge Carl Phillips.
2018 – Yanyi, The Year of Blue Water
Carl Phillips elaborated on the themes of The Year of Blue Water: “The poems suggest a quest that has involved turning to many sources for guidance: tarot, therapy, an ongoing dialogue with writers (from Audre Lorde to Raymond Carver) and with the visual artist Agnes Martin in particular; and poems especially—the making of them—, as ‘a way to ask for what exists, to invite what wants to be visible.’ The Year of Blue Water speaks to a life that feels decidedly hard-won, and worth the hardship—triumphant, ultimately: ‘I am worth the work of transformations . . . I do not fear how I will emerge from myself, or how many times.’ A strange, elegant, beguiling, persuasive debut.”
2017 – Duy Doan, We Play a Game
“If games figure in Duy Doan’s We Play a Game, they do so much more seriously, and resonantly, than the title alone suggests. For game here can mean as well the strategies for weathering those parts of society that threaten identity itself, at the level of gender (in all its fluidity), or race, of family as history and tradition—of language, too, and our expectations for it. Wide-ranging in subject, Doan’s poems include boxing, tongue twisters, hedgehogs, Billie Holiday, soccer and, hardly least of all, a Vietnamese heritage that butts up against an American upbringing in ways at once comic, estranging, off-kiltering. Doan negotiates the distance between surviving and thriving, and offers here his own form of meditation on, ultimately, childhood, history, culture—who we are, and how—refusing all along to romanticize any of it.”
2016 – Airea D. Matthews, Simulacra
“Rebellion is the first word that comes to mind, when reading simulacra, Airea Matthews’s rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant debut.”
2015 – Noah Warren, The Destroyer in the Glass
“The Destroyer in the Glass impresses at once with its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self. The poems both examine and embody the nexus of joy and sorrow, of certainty and confusion, without which there’d be none of the restlessness that makes us uniquely human. Warren’s vision is a generous one indeed—and itself a gift.”
2014 – Ansel Elkins, Blue Yodel
“Through her arresting use of persona, in particular, Ansel Elkins reminds us of the pivotal role of compassion in understanding others and—more deeply and often more disturbingly—our various inner selves,” series judge Carl Phillips says. “Razor-edged in their intelligence, southern gothic in their sensibility, these poems enter the strangenesses of others and return us to a world at once charged, changed, brutal, and luminous.”
2013 – Eryn Green, Eruv
Additional Past Winners
| 2012 – Will Schutt, Westerly | 2011 – Eduardo Corral, Slow Lightning | 2010 – Katherine Larson, Radial Symmetry |
| 2009 – Ken Chen, Juvenilia | 2008 – Arda Collins, It Is Daylight | 2007 – Fady Joudah, The Earth in the Attic |
| 2006 – Jessica Fisher, Frail-Craft | 2005 – Jay Hopler, Green Squall | 2004 – Richard Siken, Crush |
| 2003 – Peter Streckfus, The Cuckoo | 2002 – Loren Goodman, Famous Americans | 2001 – Sean Singer, Discography |
| 2000 – Maurice Manning, Lawrence Booth’s Book Of Visions | 1999 – Davis McCombs, Ultima Thule | 1998 – Craig Arnold, Shells |
| 1996- Talvikki Ansel, My Shining Archipelago | 1995 – Ellen Hinsey, Cities of Memory | 1994 – Tony Crunk, Living in The Resurrection |
| 1993 – Valerie Wohlfield, Thinking The World Visible | 1992 – Jody Gladding, Stone Crop | 1991 – Nicholas Samaras, Hands of The Saddlemaker |
| 1990 – Christiane Jacox Kyle, Bears Dancing in the Northern Air | 1989 – Daniel Hall, Hermit with Landscape | 1988 – Thomas Bolt, Out of The Woods |
| 1987 – Brigit Pegeen Kelly, To The Place of Trumpets | 1986 – Julie Agoos, Above The Lands | 1985 – George Bradley,Terms To Be Met |
| 1984 – Pamela Alexander, Navigable Waterways | 1983 – Richard Kenney, The Evolution of the Flightless Bird | 1982 – Cathy Song, Picture Bride |
| 1981 – David Wojahn, Icehouse Lights | 1980 – John Bensko, Green Soldiers | 1979 – William Virgil Davis, One Way to Reconstruct The Scene |
| 1978 – Leslie Ullman, Natural Histories | 1977 – Bin Ramke, The Difference Between Night and Day | 1976 – Olga Broumas, Beginning with O |
| 1975 – Carolyn Forché, Gathering The Tribes | 1974 – Maura Stanton, Snow on Snow | 1973 – Michael Ryan, Threats Instead of Trees |
| 1972 – Robert Hass, Field Guide | 1971 – Michael Casey, Obscenities | 1970 – Peter Klappert, Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket |
| 1969 – Hugh Seidman, Collecting Evidence | 1968 – Judith Johnson Sherwin, Uranium Poems | 1967 – Helen Chasin, Coming Close and Other Poems |
| 1966 – James Tate, The Lost Pilot | 1964 – Jean Valentine, Dream Barker | 1963 – Peter Davison, The Breaking of the Day |
| 1962 – Sandra Hochman, Manhattan Pastures | 1961 – Jack Gilbert, Views of Jeopardy | 1960 – Alan Dugan, Poems |
| 1959 – George Starbuck, Bone Thoughts | 1958 – William Dickey, Of The Festivity | 1957 – John Hollander, A Crackling of Thorns |
| 1956 – James Wright, The Green Wall | 1955 – John Ashbery, Some Trees | 1953 – Daniel Hoffman, An Armada of Thirty Whales |
| 1952 – Edgar Bogardus, Various Jangling Keys | 1951 – W. S. Merwin, A Mask for Janus | 1950 – Adrienne Rich, A Change of World |
| 1948 – Rosalie Moore, The Grasshopper’s Man and Other Poems | 1947 – Robert Horan, A Beginning | 1946 – Joan Murray, Poems |
| 1945 – Eve Merriam, Family Circle | 1944 – Charles E. Butler, Cut Is the Branch | 1943 – William Meredith, Love Letters from an Impossible Land |
| 1941 – Margaret Walker, For My People | 1940 – Jeremy Ingalls, The Metaphysical Sword | 1939 – Norman Rosten, Return Again, Traveler |
| 1938 – Reuel Denney, The Connecticut River and Other Poems | 1937 – Joy Davidman, Letter to a Comrade | 1936 – Margaret Haley, The Gardener Mind |
| 1935 – Edward Weis Miller, The Deer Come Down | 1934 – Muriel Rukeyser, Theory of Flight | 1933 – James Agee, Permit Me Voyage |
| 1932 – Shirley Baker, The Dark Hills Under | 1931 – Paul Engle, Worn Earth | 1930 – Dorothy Belle Flanagan (aka Dorothy B. Hughes) – Dark Certainty |
| 1929 – Louise Owen, Virtuosa | 1928 – Henri Faust, Half-Light and Overture Frances M. Frost, Hemlock Wall | 1927 – Francis Claiborne Mason, This Unchanging Mask Ted Olson, A Stranger and Afraid Mildred Bowers, Twist o’ Smoke |
| 1926 – Lindley Williams Hubbell, Dark Pavilion | 1925 – Thomas Hornsby Ferril, High Passage Eleanor Slater, Quest | 1924 – Dorothy E. Reid, Coach into Pumpkin |
| 1923 – Elizabeth Jessup Blake, Up and Down | 1922 – Beatrice E. Harmon, Mosaics Marion M. Boyd, Silver Wands Amos Niven Wilder, Battle-Retrospect Dean B. Lyman, Jr., The Last Lutanist | 1921 – Paul Tanaquil, Attitudes Barnard Raymund, Hidden Waters Medora C. Addison, Dreams and a Sword Harold Vinal, White April |
| 1920 – Oscar Williams, Golden Darknes sHervey Allen, Wampum and Old Gold Viola C. White, Horizons Theodore H. Banks, Jr., Wild Geese | 1919 – Darl MacLeod Boyle, Where Lilith Dances Thomas Caldecot Chubb, The White God and Other Poem sAlfred Raymond Bellinger, Spires and Poplars David Osborne Hamilton, Four Gardens | 1918 – John C. Farrar, Forgotten Shrines Howard Buck, The Tempering |
