2012 Poetry Advisory Committee: William Brockman, Steven Herb, Julia Kasdorf, Christopher Walker
2012 Poetry Selection Committee: Ed Ochester, G.C. Waldrep, Eleanor Wilner
2012 Poetry Advisory Committee: William Brockman, Steven Herb, Julia Kasdorf, Christopher Walker
2012 Poetry Selection Committee: Ed Ochester, G.C. Waldrep, Eleanor Wilner
“Toi Derricotte's poetry is accessible, often about contemporary events or situations, and very moving. You have a sense, reading her work or listening to her, that this is an intelligent and compassionate poet who lives in our world. An indication of the high regard in which she is held: Toi was just named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.”
from Captivity, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990
“Jacqueline Osherow, in her poster poem, ‘Breezeway, circa 1964,’ brings the past to life and light--opening, with ‘the leisurely fireworks of fireflies’ and the music of cicadas and crickets, one of those endless, sultry summer evenings of childhood: ‘All this,’ she writes, ‘from a stoop in Philadelphia.’"
from With a Moon in Transit, Grove Press, 1996
“‘The thought of her alone would be/pretty, were she not true,’ Bohince writes. But the truth is that every frame of vision our eyes afford is more than just a picture: it's a ‘truth’ that marries every image with the beholder's own past, intelligence, and longings...This is a gorgeous poem of relinquishment, of the almost unbearable beauty of the sensual world: of letting go."
from The Children, Sarabande Books , 2012
“‘The Stiller of Atoms,’ by Alpay Ulku, is one of those rare poems that simply astonishes--creating a kind of autonomous mythology that makes brilliant, imaginable figures of the great forces that sweep us away,: ‘The Stiller of Atoms,’ ‘Polaris, king of hunger and the shivering animals.’ This visionary poem moves seamlessly from these elemental and cold forces to the porch of the personal realm, original and startling in both its images and its insights: ‘Wonder for things that meant so much the subject never came up.’"
Ploughshares, 2009