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Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry
Named for its first poetry editor, TTU Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English Walter Robert (Walt) McDonald, this annual invitation-only first-book prize awards publication annually to exceptional previously unpublished poets.
Prospect comprises poems about vantage points, country and personhood, and the difficulty of understanding what is true. Through meticulously articulated explorations of knowledge, truth, language, and science’s explanatory power, Prospect propels us toward grasping even the metaphysical. Presented in four parts—Prospect, Country, Proof, and Studies on Anatomy and Mourning—Prospect offers a vision of life scaled as small as a cell and as large as a country, as bordered and un-bordered as a human body, and heightened by the tensions of all that cannot be known.
Cassie Pruyn's Lena asks new questions: why we love, why we grieve. We've read elegies before, but not like this. A lush and unsparing first book, Lena asks readers to understand love--crucially, a first love, an erotic love-in the context not of a love lost but instead of an identity gained: we must consider not only "was she worth it?," but also "who has she made me?" Pruyn lets us feel what lovers feel--the magnetism, the physicality, the tenderness, the rage, the wondering--with language both musical and visceral. In these poems, the landscape is a character in itself; the past is as tangible as the present. Pruyn takes us to the "Lost Love Lounge," we ride in a "car / red as a dragon," and we observe the beloved "stick herself in the belly with a needle" in the way "she used to attach her cufflinks." This is love and...
What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth—complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible—about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition...
Horse and Rider takes its title from a passage in the book of Exodus: “Sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has cast into the sea.” Melissa Range’s poems explore violence and power, particularly as those concepts relate to religion and to the natural world. Her mixture of free and formal verse is populated with warriors, weapons, animals, and figures from the Bible and mythology. In a galloping triptych of ancient and apocalyptic visions, these vigorous poems probe the recurring image of the horse and its sometimes troubled, sometimes loving relationship with its rider.
In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman’s relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and...
In her first volume of poetry, novelist Sarah Strong celebrates silence and what can be learned when we wait and listen. In this stillness, she shows us, we may hear answers to questions we have learned...
Walt McDonald First-Book award winner for 2002, now back in print in paperback, in time for publication of the author’s second novel, Catherine, in 2013.
In Elsewhere, Kyoko Uchida unravels the landscapes of childhood migrations and later passages across oceans and continents, seasons and languages—spoken or otherwise—mapping the geographies of longing, loss, grief, and conflict. These poems are preoccupied with itineraries and distance, while at the same time negotiating space at the intersection of shared fragilities and efforts to communicate. Imbued with an outsider’s need for precise definitions, they attempt to pare down to the essential core each place, each yearning and absence.
