Richard Siken's "Crush", selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional,...

The winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, present sensations, and the impingements of th...

The Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Its winners include some of the most influential voices in American poetry, including Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Forche, and Robert Hass...

Considered among the most important collections of poetry written by a participant in the Black Chicago Renaissance, For My People is a series of ballad poems with memorable characters, including the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a t...

The poems in "Gathering the Tribes" recount experiences from the author's adolescence and young?adult life, closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body's functioning. Many deal with uprootedness – hasty emigrations...

Christian Wiman, a poet known for his meditations on mortality, has long been fascinated by joy and by its relative absence in modern literature. Why is joy so resistant to language? How has it become so suspect in our times? Manipulated by advertise...

While Merwin's poetry as a whole is grounded in the poetic forms of many eras and societies, this first collection is inspired by classical models. Writing in American Poetry Review, Vernon Young traces the poems to "Biblical tales, Classical myth, l...

The first of seven books of poetry published during Dugan's lifetime, "Poems" examines the unusual details of everyday subjects, including waterfalls, house plants, love, war, religion, and the Irish. Explorations inevitably arouse feelings of aliena...

Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible". After the publication of "Some Trees", selecting j...

In an essay on his own work in "19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate", Jack Gilbert writes that "I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection... One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means...