We’re delighted to announce the winner of the 2009 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize:

Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin

Selected by Fanny Howe
to be Published February 2011

Dawn Lundy Martin, a poet, essayist, and activist, was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips for her first poetry collection, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007). She is also the author of The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship, and The Undress, a chaplet published by Belladonna Books.  A founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, she is an assistant professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

 
Fanny Howe’s citation:

“These poems are dense and deep. They are necessary, and hot on the eye. I was reminded of Leslie Scalapino, the sensitivity to the surrounding arrangements and to human suffering. There is no distance from Martin’s subject, but immersion and emotional conflict. Discipline is what it took to write such a potent set of poems.”

From Discipline:

How do we encounter the many hours past twilight? We understand
that the light is something other, that it catapults us toward a desire
or two if we’re lucky. But, lately, daylight eats itself, and is percussive
in its chewing, a carnival of curses and thumps. Nothing is wrong. In
the hours after the whinny of the long train passing, we continue to
think, how special we are, how born and cosmic, how just plain indi-
vidual, but it is not enough. Nothing out there. Everything out there.
What does it matter then, if the body climbs into a plastic car, drives
into a deserted driveway and becomes another self? Elsewhere: One
body found. One policeman shot. One 4-year-old girl shot. Teeter,
tweeter, la, la, la, la, la. I am the I watching the I lift. Roads are short
with darkness. I think, this is what they mean when they say, Savage.

THE FINALISTS (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY LAST NAME) ARE:

Brian Barker of Denver for The Black Ocean
Michael Tod Edgerton of Athens, GA for Vitreous Hide
Jennifer Firestone of Brooklyn for Flashes
Ryan Flaherty of Dover, NH for What’s This, Bombardier?
Esther Lee of Salt Lake City for Spit & Saliva
Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow of Iowa City for Whale in the Woods
Alexandra Mattraw of San Francisco for honest as any treeless place
Lance Phillips of Huntersville, NC for Mimer

We will be featuring the finalists on our webpage through the spring, so please check back.

Bruce Boone made a rare visit to New York City last weekend to celebrate the publication of the new edition of Century of Clouds. He read at the Nightboat Books Winter Release Party and, with Rob Halpern, in the Segue Reading Series. He also made his fist visit to the Frick Collection. Read Thom Donovan’s report (which included his introduction to Bruce’s reading at Segue) on the Poetry Foundation Blog here.

Review of Tiresias:

Read Kevin Killian’s amazing review of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman:

As we discover, other reasons caused Hickman to put his own work on the back burner, and it sounds as though while we were all waiting for a successor to the one book, the “Great Slave Lake Suite,” Hickman was actually not writing much of anything at all. Editing Temblor and maintaining, in the days before e-mail, a vast correspondence with many of the world’s most innovative poets, ate up his time, and of course so did AIDS. Motika produces a few “new” pieces (of very high quality), but don’t go looking to this new collection for lots and lots of new material; instead the value of the book is twofold, it returns to print the major work of an interesting poet, and in addition it simplifies and makes legible by re-arrangement, the order and the valences of this work.

It is a prophetic, shamanic work fueled by rage, grief and sudden bursts of homosexual feeling. Hickman lived in a dangerous age in dangerous cities, and he was punished, imprisoned, institutionalized for his penchant for public sex. A private story makes itself felt through the densest and most lyrical parts of his poems, something to do with his dad, an intense Oedipal love hate thing like Raymond Massey slapping James Dean in Kazan’s film of East of Eden. In one excruciating passage the father strips the son to dowse him with a burning liquid to rid him of crabs, souvenirs of the teenager’s uncontrollable need for sex with strangers. Hickman’s poetry often seemed to me to be a queer amalgam of Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and something of Swinburne in him, a masochistic drive that spits the words out over the page (many lines begin with the single word “o,” not the uppercase “O” of Keats, but just a tiny little mouth remembering) and create a portrait etched in acid. And like William Burroughs’ wild boys, his memories seem to reach back to a prewar paradise of roadsters, red-tiled public toilets, outhouses with rattlers twisting in the Pasadena sun. The speaker derives power from the scopophilia that makes him anxious to see, to watch, the forbidden accdientally exposed, in a dramatic rehearsal of his own early abuse.

That makes Tiresias sound sensational, and Mohr advises us not to think of Hickman’s writing as “confessional” in any shape or form. Hickman’s sophisticated, alienated use of language allows him to revisit American trauma, by endowing the primal with a series of complicating screens and taxonomies. I don’t know, it still seems confessional to me, why there are even scenes of the child Lee Jr going to confession, confessing the sins of the child. “Absolve, absolve him.” This new book invites us into a dark wet cave where all the most exciting and painful things are happening all the time, awake and in dreams. Somewhere there’s a whisper, “sonny, hush, stop dwelling on it,” but the roar in one’s ears drowns out that quiet voice.

Published on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Tiresias-Collected-Poems-Leland-Hickman/dp/0982264518