Awards

Poetry Center BOOK AWARD | Audre Lorde AWARD | Academy of American POETS | Browning Society AWARD | Frances Jaffer PRIZE

The Poetry Center Book Award

The annual Poetry Center Book Award has been given by The Poetry Center, based at San Francisco State University, since 1980 to a single outstanding book of poetry published in the previous year. The Poetry Center Book Award carries a cash prize and an invitation to read, along with the award judge, at The Poetry Center in San Francisco.

The Poetry Center Book Award Winner

2005 - Dara Wier, Reverse Rapture (Verse Press), Selected by Stephen Rodefer

            “(and then it moves back in at the end of the day)
              (they’re sundogs)  (there’s no way to catch one)…

              (it’s scaffolding)  (it’s supposed to be temporary)…

                                            (to see what they were saying)  (ere
               we close them)  (ere flies an arrow out of time)’’           

'Thus begins, middles, and closes Dara Wier's extraordinary book-length poem Reverse Rapture (43 sections of nine stanzas each of nine lines each). Every and each linguistic unit after the poem's prologue is in parenthesis (ere we close them), making a syntactic jam of a prolonged string of beads both connective and projective, discrete and copulative. A paratactic and sometime screened (but still sequenced) poetic 'narrative' of thought, time, room, face, secrets, address, body, relations, religion, 'casual' philosophy, the domestic, demons and the demotic, language and much else-in a steady unfolding of 'distanced but under your skin' mind-forms. All at last circumscribed (in one gigantic invisible parenthesis) by Emily Dickinson's epitaph, “Called Back,” and the author's reversal, “Called early.” Both being the living poet's calling.'

–Stephen Rodefer View list of past winners



Guidelines

The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University seeks submissions for the annual Poetry Center Book Award.

Entrees will be accepted for the 2007 award from July 1, 2007 to January 31, 2008.

Published original books by a single author (no collaborative works, anthologies, translations, or manuscripts) must be copyrighted 2007. Entrees can be submitted by publisher, author, or by a reader. An entry fee of $10 per book (all of which is paid directly to the award winner and award judge) must accompany each book. Please include a cover letter listing the author's name, book title(s), name of person or publisher issuing check, and check number.

Checks should be payable to The Poetry Center and entrees mailed to:

The Poetry Center/SFSU
2007 Book Award
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco CA 94132

 

The judge for the award will not be announced in advance.



Home | San Francisco State University © 2006
Valid XHTML, CSS.