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.


