Poetry

Winner of the 2001 T. S. Eliot Prize. An account of travel and a collection of ecstatic lyrics, these poems excavate an idea of place, one layered deep for the poet and archaeologist to discover.

This is the first English translation of Belgian poet Albert Giraud’s collection of fifty poems, Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques (1884).

A literary landmark, this bilingual collection of poems represents the only literature of the Ahtna culture in existence.  Here John Smelcer renders these poems in his native tongue with English translations.

In these lyrical poems, Carol V. Davis explores earthy and mysterious themes.

Julie Fay’s magnificent Blue Scorpion seeks out the “dense and promising weather” of experience and reports generously on marriage, motherhood, friendship, and expatriate life. But what makes her poems powerful and unique is the way, regardless of their subject, they are always in touch with the “liquid fire our bodies’ goblets contain.” This fire does not burn but rather it illuminates all the particularities and passions of our lives with a warm and steady flame.

—Michael Collier

This is a brooding and daring collection of lyric prose set on the lush prairie of eastern Kansas.

This collection of hard-edged, contemporary sonnets takes an uncompromising look at the current times, and our human failings and foibles.

William Baer now steps forward into the first rank of contemporary American poets. He has gradually become well known among other poets and some critics, and has been widely published in literary magazines; but this new volume, which is lucid and eminently accessible, amounts to a virtuoso performance with the sonnet form, and possesses coherence while treating very important themes.

—National Review

This elegant volume of poetry is a testament to the craft of a greatly admired Missouri poet.

The author of Creating Another Self takes a hard look at L.A., where conventional rules of behavior give way to the violence, lust, and chaos that mark our times.

Samuel Maio displays an imagination omnivorous enough to celebrate and elegize a landscape at once the City of Dreams and the City of Lost Illusions.

—Dana Gioia

The Chariton Review publishes the best in short fiction, poetry, translations, and essays in two issues each year. See backlisted journals here.

Vol. 34, No. 1 & 2 (2011)

This prize-winning collection is rigorous, experimental, and intimate.

In this expanded and updated volume, Samuel Maio is definitive and comprehensive in his discussion of American personal poetry.

This collection of lyric poems offers a unique look at the shared, but very different experiences of life in the Navy for father and son.

Spence’s lyrics resonate like steel hulls under intense emotional pressure, their assured lines haunted by patriarchal silences and love. A heartbreaking collection!

—David Yezzi

Winner of the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize. In finely wrought, image-driven poems, The Empty Boat explores the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the human relationship to the natural world, asking how nature speaks to us and what wisdom and solace it may offer the tragic aspects of our lives.

Winner of the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize. Erotic Distance explores our most intimate relationships and private lives in language that is at once painterly, sensual, and exacting.

Along with a beautiful graciousness, this book offers its readers an engaged conscience. Erotic Distance is an important book.

—Bin Ramke

Finely crafted narratives and lyric meditations offer a host of small epiphanies arising from everyday life.

These poems traverse the realms of art, history, horticulture, and medicine, excavating our sensual world to find meaning.

With a keen sense of observation and humility, and with subtle humor even in the face of tragedy, John Ridland bridges the past, present, and future by acknowledging the human need to reconcile ourselves with our memories.

From her early childhood in the Dominican Republic, Rhina Espaillat learned the pleasures of traditional lyric poetry with wordplay, repetition, and patterns of sounds that allow for interplay between sound and sense.

Through transcendent, lyric verse, these poems explore the spiritual struggle for harmony between the contemporary and contemplative life.

Winner of the 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize. With an easy shift of identities, Gurley gives us dramatic dialogues of obscure or well-known voices—naturalists, ornithologists, nutritionists, photographers, painters—convincing demonstrations of the best kind of literary empathy.

Captivating and truthful, In the Buddha Factory is rich in detail, honest in tragedy, and poignant in observation.

Winner of the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize. Carol V. Davis is the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her fascination with Russia, aided by a Fulbright grant, drew her to St. Petersburg in the mid 1990s.

This is a marvelous book of deep and varied poetry.

—Poetix

The wide range of voices in this collection illustrates the extent Greece moves those who get to know the country intimately, and how its history, mythology, and modern diversity hold a significant place in the American poetic imagination.

Covering 50 years in diverse poetry styles and images, 40 modern-American poets, forever inspired by their Greek experiences, spin a poetic tapestry of Greece.

—Lovin’ Life News

The Lions’ Gate introduces a crucial voice in world poetry to readers in English. Titos Patrikios is a poet of witness and engagement. A member of the intellectual left in post-war Greece, he survived imprisonment, hard labor, censorship, and exile.

This wonderful edition honors the work of an important poet who remains active and relevant at the turn of the twenty-first century.            

       —World Literature Today

Winner of the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize. With tender probing and tight, expressive language, The Miniature Room explores the grace and power of the miniscule as it exists within an infinite universe.

In this collection of poems, faith brings together the mundane and mysterious to explore how the world offers the solace of forgiveness and love as a comfort against loss.

Winner of the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize. A road trip novel-in-verse, Mutiny Gallery follows a mother and son on an exuberant cross-country journey to outposts of Americana.

Winner of the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize. Victoria Brockmeier composes a mosaic of storytelling, myths, and feminist ideas in her award-winning collection of poems, my maiden cowboy names.

Richard Moore’s tenth published collection of poems offers insights into twentieth-century American life. Moore’s poems are in rhythms and discernible forms, witty, moving, and above all, understandable.

These poems are filled with the sadness of loss that is ultimately gain in the psyche of one unerring voice. Each poem is jewel-sharp and distinct, yet many-faceted in its knowledge of light and dark.

Meditations on time, memory, and love, these poems are firmly grounded in particular landscapes and gain their power through Rose’s brilliant control of the sentence and her feeling for the apt metaphor.

Although Rose is a prodigious rhymer, often packing her end-rhymed lines with internal rhymes on the same sounds, it is her concentrated, urgent metaphors and similes that most define her poetics.... Rose is at her best when personal and public concerns coincide, when the urgency of her imagery is matched by emotional urgency.

—The Antioch Review

Playing at Stillness displays Rhina Espaillat’s range—from exquisitely executed formal verse to wonderfully fluid and appealing free verse poems. Humorous and playful, astute and poignant, she never gets in her way—her craft does all the work and we delight in the results.

—Julia Alvarez

Espaillat is a poet of both surfaces and depths, someone who crafts fine lines.

—The Hudson Review

Winner of the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. This collection of poems examines the damaged lives of society’s lost and marginalized using myth and fairy tale as an ironic lens.

In a fresh telling of biblical stories, William Baer takes us on a poetic journey through the Old and New Testament scriptures.

Richard St. John eloquently illuminates the human condition in surprising and profound ways in this collection of poems.

St. John has crafted a volume that rewards the reader with its wisdom and its frankness, its meditations on the universality of human experience.

—Poet Lore

Winner of the 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize. In his second book of poetry, H. L. Hix uses two contrasting poetic sequences.

Winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. These narrative poems celebrate the day-to-day lives of Black New Orleans and the rare magic in the culture.

Mona Lisa Saloy captures the street idioms and culture of New Orleans that challenge the tourist misconceptions about that fabulous city. She also succeeds where many performance poets fail. These poems are music to the ear as well as on the page.

—Ishmael Reed, 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize judge

Winner of the 1999 T. S. Eliot Prize. The Rose Inside is a collection of poems where the outsider longs to get inside and those trapped inside look out. The art guides one to a place beyond dualities to fully participate in the good work of love, separation, and death.

This is a wide book and a deep one, alive with marvelous composition and outcry. And yet, for all its zest of expression it is real life and real feeling that is most honored.

—Mary Oliver, 1999 T. S. Eliot judge

Winner of the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize. This prize-winning collection guides readers through the working-class neighborhood of Kensington, not as tourists or passersby, but as open-eyed observers of the visceral and unique spirit of the locales and its inhabitants.

David Livewell has an affectionate way of collecting his thoughts, the poems’ impulses, his personal and shared history. In the book’s beginning he collects “Philly Things”: at the summation he and his loved ones collect together.

—Sandra McPherson, 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize judge

In Roald Hoffmann’s fourth collection of poetry, Soliton, we face the full scope and power of his outlook—he writes of nature and bittersweet love, Jewish themes and his Holocaust survival.

The intelligent, eloquent, and luminous poems in H. L. Hix’s third full-length collection, Surely As Birds Fly, exceed the amazing promise and scope of Perfect Hell (1996) and Rational Numbers (2000).

A 64-page model of concision in which every word is alive and at work on the page, contributing to a book that is beautiful, frightening, cerebral and visceral.

—The Kansas City Star

This collection showcases the creative range and essential writing of David Wevill, an elusive and enigmatic poetic figure. His work shines among a generation of postwar poets known for their literary invention, dissemination of poetry in translation, political witness, and obsession with the image.

Winner of the 1997 T. S. Eliot Prize. A unique collection of uncompromising poetic portraits written in the tradition of Masters, Robinson, and the verse portraits of Pound and Eliot.

This willingness to look outside himself, bringing a wide range of human subjects to the short poem, deserves high praise. The book’s numerological tidiness—thirty-seven poems of two eight-line stanzas, three longer poems containing nine stanzas each of the same length—conveys deliberateness upon these mostly untidy lives.

—The Hudson Review

Winner of the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Where Horizons Go bridges the sometimes vast distances between the personal and the impersonal, the transitory and the permanent, the imagined and the real, the internal and the external, the self and the other.

Winner of the 2004 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.
Winner of the 2004 Western Writers of America Award for Poetry.

Without Reservation is a collection of free-verse poetry by Alaskan Native American John E. Smelcer that emphasizes clear tone and vivid images that are simple, honest, and as-is. Smelcer is the only surviving speaker, reader, and writer of his native language of Atna, Without Reservation is a compelling voice, unforgettable and highly recommended. 

—Library Bookwatch

Mining the veins of myth, love, and the natural world, Valerie Wohlfeld writes in lyrical, sensuous language that interplays with poetic form.

Winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize. Emotionally and intellectually engaging, Dean Rader’s debut collection of poetry undertakes provocative questions about identity in original, ambitious, and playful ways.