The Allen Ginsberg poetry awards results are in, plus some thoughts on the Paterson Poetry Prize finalists - revisited

[DiamondDallas86]

Poetry Center at PCCC posted their results and the Allen Ginsberg awards went to Daniel Donaghy for My Mother at Christmas and Rafaella Del Bourgo for Nightgown 1960 in first prize, with Lisa Coll Nicolaou and Charles Rossiter taking second. The Paterson Poetry Prize finalist list is also worth attention, with Jive Poetic's Skip Tracer from Liveright, Tanya Olson's Born Backwards from YesYes, and Nikki Wallschlaeger's Hold Your Own from Copper Canyon.

The Wallschlaeger inclusion is what I want to talk about. Hold Your Own is doing something with the page and with Black speech registers that almost nobody else working right now is attempting. It deserves the recognition. Copper Canyon has had an extraordinary year and this is the third or fourth title I have seen them put forward into prize season.

The Ginsberg awards function differently to the bigger national prizes. They tend to honour personal lyric work that the big awards often look past in favour of the more obviously ambitious projects. There is value in both. The Ginsberg list and the Paterson finalist list reading next to each other is the contemporary American poetry landscape in miniature

News & Winners - The Poetry Center at PCCCwww.poetrycenterpccc.com

[GlassyCandle]

Wallschlaeger is the most underrated poet working in America right now and I will die on this hill

[QuantumLeap53]

Hold Your Own is great but Crawlspace was the genuinely revolutionary book in that catalogue

[Aura49]

Both, both is good. The point is she should have been getting this attention three books ago

[TeaAndCode72]

Copper Canyon is on a heater this year, agreed

[SilverRider]

Jive Poetic from Liveright is a smart pick up, his performance work has been excellent for years

[Owen84]

Liveright is publishing more poetry than it has in decades, that imprint has quietly become serious

[Cole_25]

The Paterson Prize has been pretty solid as a finalist list lately, less Iowa MFA workshop heavy than some other awards

[VoidSentinel74]

Honestly the Ginsberg awards are the most consistently moving reading I get all year, the lyric I done well still slaps

[Courier53]

Donaghy winning first is well earned, that man has been writing the same Connecticut working class lyric for thirty years and it gets better every time

[NeutrinoX74]

Nightgown 1960 is the kind of poem that reminds you why this format exists in the first place