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William Baer
Praise for The Unfortunates: "The subjects of this astonishing portrait gallery of poems are profoundly unnerving, alarming, haunting, touching and distressing. This is one of the most deeply unsettling books of poetry I have read in a very long time. The dramas of these portraits are all the more powerful and disturbing by virtue of the quiet, understated terms in which they are composed." — Anthony Hecht
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Rachel Hadas
"Rachel Hadas’s remarkable new book treats the Aeneid as a commentary on our times. Just as Virgil wrote against the backdrop of the self-conflicted, imperial turbulence of Rome, Hadas examines our republic as it veers off into possibly irreversible disorder." — Timothy Steele
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Ryan Wilson
WINNER OF THE 2016 DONALD JUSTICE PRIZE! “Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative. The idiomatic, American blank verse of Wilson’s ‘Authority’ and ‘L’Estraneo’ is as fluent as that of Robert Frost, but with an oblique tenderness that reminds me of Frost’s friend Edward Thomas.” — Robert Pinsky
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Juliana Gray
"Honeymoon Palsy throws one hell of a shindig. On the reception’s dance floor, you’ll find Claudius waltzing with Lizzie Borden, Hamlet jigging and ambling with Ophelia, and a wry 21st-century smirk in step with genuine grief. Here a wholly contemporary voice is wed to the stateliest and oldest forms of the tradition." — Dan Albergotti, author of Millennial Teeth
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Wil Mills
"These last poems of Wil Mills reflect the life he led, a life filled with joy, wonder, and gentle wit. His carefully crafted meditations on keenly observed details of the everyday serve as urgent reminders that we should live our lives more intensely and kindly." --A.M. Juster
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Wil Mills
"As a man, a carpenter, and a poet, Wil Mills was always a craftsman, a maker of the truest sort. These poems, wrought from the places and persons of everyday life, depict the near misses and occasional collisions with what Flannery O’Connor called 'grace.'" --R.S. Gwynn
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Ernest Hilbert
WINNER OF THE 2017 POETS' PRIZE! "Caligulan delivers on all of its title's promise. Every poem evokes the world we live in: we know something is wrong and, in a minute, will likely be worse; but there's beauty in the portent and in the self-awareness we need to see it." — Erica Dawson
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Ned Balbo
"In his fourth book of poetry, Ned Balbo finds bits of the true history of our time in what we thoughtlessly discard: comic books, old postcards, stories torn out of yellowed newspapers, decayed superheroes — even 'a timepiece not yet obsolete.' The elegant poems he makes from these discards offer us a way of navigating and celebrating the contradictions of our time. It should come as no surprise that in the title poem, this skillful formalist reveals himself as a true heir of Paumanok’s great bard." —Charles Martin
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A.M. Juster
"This is verse with a light touch and a keen edge, whether Juster is bringing Horace into English — where he sounds like a contemporary well-acquainted with the goings-on in the smoke-filled backrooms of Washington, D.C. — or borrowing the persona of Billy Collins...." — Alfred Nicol
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Erica Dawson
WINNER OF THE 2016 POETS' PRIZE! "... Her words never subside into shopworn sounds, each poem displaying her rare and enviable genius for making verse sing, which is to say croon, caterwaul, belt, syncopate, wail." — David Yezzi