Each year the Griffin Poetry Prize judges name a shortlist comprised of four international poets and three Canadian poets, from which the two eventual winners are chosen. This week brought news of this year's shortlist, and we were glad to see two PennSound poets among those honored: Douglas Kearney and Ed Roberson.
Kearney is honored for Sho (Wave Books), which the judges' citation summarizes as the poet's "genius, vulnerability, and virtuosity on full display." "These poems live in the rhythms of negotiation and navigation, at the root of saying. They elide, slide, exist in fitful comprehension of our world – where the public and private collide," they observe, before concluding: "Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearney’s poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearney’s body of work to date." On PennSound's Douglas Kearney author page you'll find a selection of readings from 2005– 2018 from Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cambridge.
Roberson is nominated for Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press). The judges' citation notes in part that "Poised between the vertical forces of social inequality and racial injustice, the horizontal sprawl of ghettoized urban growth and environmental degradation, and the temporal trajectories of a glacial past and a climate-changed future, these poems position a poetic eye attuned not only to seeing, 'but with understanding sight.'" They continue, "Through inventive language that moves with the sonic beauty and unpredictability of lake breakers, or wheeling swallows, [this book] is a challenging and urgent interrogation of and reckoning with the history, violence, and revelatory inevitability of interconnectedness between humans and nonhumans." In conclusion, they hail the collection as "a crucial contribution to pressing political, artistic, and environmental questions." On PennSound's Ed Roberson author page, you'll find a treasure trove of readings, performances, interviews, panel discussions and more from the beloved poet, starting in 1993 and going all the way up to 2018.
We send our congratulations to Kearney, Roberson, and the rest of the very deserving finalists, and will look forward to hearing who eventually takes the prize.
