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Winner, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Narcissus Americana sings and scraps and wrestles its way across various landscapes—abandoned quarries, art museums, lavish homes, and tar pits—in a quest to attain a more complex vision of what it means to be upwardly mobile.

These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism’s failure to assuage human loneliness, the speakers in these poems find joy in shared meals and glasses of wine, and use moments of mutual attention to challenge notions of class in America. Intimacy is on display in “Cruising Altitude,” where the speaker finds a sublime communion between two disparate worldviews during an in-flight conversation with his father:

I ask if his certainty about humanity’s course gives
his life some kind of purpose. He doesn’t sleep well.
I know this. I quote Yeats. He quotes scripture.
Light balances on the wing and casts its yellow spell. . . .

Sharply written, and with an eye for form, these poems engage with heavy inquiry but also know better than to take themselves too seriously, making it possible for, say, dungeons to share space with donuts, as in the poem “Rancho La Brea.”

Mossotti’s timely book invites the reader to traverse America, and see the nation anew, on a journey marked simultaneously by critical scrutiny and deep affection.

Winner of the eighth annual Arkansas Poetry Award, Martin Lammon writes poems that deal fearlessly and directly with their subjects. Tenderness, complexity, compassion, reverence, and condemnation are all within his range.

Writing of love, he can speak broadly and universally of the heart, yet in the same poem, he can intricately describe a woman’s hand, a fire on a beach, or the hollows around a lover’s eye. Even when he works in the voice of a suicide, his precision can be devastating, as in these lines: “When you lie beside me under stars, each needlepoint / of light pricks my bare arms.”

With equal ease, Lammon travels across miles, cultures, and time, writing of kilns and potters in Japan, long-dead Eskimos in Alaska, or Blue Hole Cave in Pennsylvania.

Full of grace and candor, these poems pursue the stories that shimmer behind the day’s headlines, seeking the spirit at stake in the “lives beside [our] own whose secrets are worth loving.”

If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.

Surprisingly, there is a poem about the Mississippi in which Cassity grew up. Unsurprisingly, it is a vision quite unlike others of that state. Its chilly and amusing precision is about as far from Southern Gothic as you can get, although elsewhere there are faint hints of a failed Good Ole Boy. Indeed, the final poems in the collection are a bit more personal than one expects of this writer.

As rigorous in form as they are in feeling, the poems of No Second Eden are not for those with preconceived ideas of poetry or its purpose. Early in Cassity’s career, James Merrill described Cassity’s work as “an opera house in the jungle.” True so far as it goes, but he might also have called it the jungle in the opera house: a glimpse at the savagery behind every façade.

Nu-Way traces the evolution of a writer from a three-year-old sitting on the counter of her daddy’s dry cleaner's to a fully developed poet. George Ella Lyon journeys from her role as the keeper of family stories to the teller of her own. This is a book of becoming, of claiming a self.

Growing up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, near all four of her grandparents, Lyon was schooled in secrets and learned, of necessity, to keep her own. In Nu-Way, her sixth collection, she takes up both sides of the family tapestry: the scenes intentionally stitched and the tangle on the other side. This is not a process of power, but of inner transformation, of coming to terms with herself as well as the people who made her. It holds the tension of opposites—the individual and the collective—without sacrificing either. Highly sharable, Nu-Way will appeal to readers who often feel shut out of poetry.