What's New?
On this page you can view:
- Events and other important news, including links to information about upcoming events sponsored in whole or part by Anhinga Press.
- Brief information about recently published titles from Anhinga Press. For more information about a given book or poet, just click on the appropriate link.
- Brief information about forthcoming titles from Anhinga Press. For more information about a given book or poet, just click on the appropriate link.
Events and other news
Date |
Summary |
Description |
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| 2009-11-17 | 2009 Anhinga Prize Winner Announced |
Gretchen Steele Pratt has been chosen as winner of the 2009 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, for her manuscript One Island. |
New titles
| New & Selected Poems: 1955 to 2010 (2010, by Robert Dana) |
 About Yes, Everything:The apparently gentle ingenuousness of Robert Dana's deft and durable poems is deceptive; it conceals a sturdy, hard-earned sensitivity, an open-eyed and open-hearted readiness to confront whatever comes for it, to keep whatever in pain or joy proves worthy of keeping. -- C.K. Williams |
| Arranging the Blaze (2009, by Chad Sweeney) |
 The poetry of Chad Sweeney is exuberant, imagistic, and prophetic. It locates a "critical moment" of the ineffable that would be inexpressible, had it not been so beautifully expressed: "the last hawk in the net of his eye." Prophetic means of the world -- "the median burns with oleander from Miami to LA" and "the beer tastes of uranium" -- but also touched by the marvelous ("the fire is folded inside its wood"). This is a poetry of awakening, of coming into knowledge. We are near the beginning and the end, but in a curiously real place where you can hear the white teeth of a bull pull at the grass. -- Paul Hoover |
| Five Kingdoms (2009/Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series, by Kelle Groom) |
 Kelle Groom's poems are like underwater songs, sung from the submerged continent of the inner life, the life we don't often expose to the outer world, the one we don't speak of. They have the bemused slightly sad knowledge of lived life, but mainly, these poems come from the muse of soulfulness, they are "tender-minded" -- they balance honesty with perceptiveness of others, which is the true sign of tenderness. They are wry, artful, sad, loving, and moving. A true pleasure. -- Tony Hoagland |
| The Real Warnings (2009/Anhinga Prize for Poetry, by Rhett Iseman Trull) |
 Open this book up anywhere and you'll find a poem of fierce and uncompromising energy and insight, a poem that doesn't pull any punches or take any prisoners, a poem that will both stun and uplift, even as it wounds and sometimes descends into darkness. I've never read a poet who understands more fully the brutal paradoxes of love and of loving damaged things, nor have I ever read one whose epiphanies felt truer. Even more than the real warnings, this collection represents the real thing and you'll be changed by reading it. -- Sheryl St. Germain, 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry Judge |
| The Snowbound House (2009/Levine Prize in Poetry, by Shane Seely) |
 Shane Seely turns the earth over and over to find "the rind of the world." Two boys discover a bullet, a couple fight "through a mouth of toothpaste," a father gives his son a rifle. These are poems of filial complexity, meditations on death's cruelty and kindness, poems of amplitude and depth which ask us to live fully in "the length of morning." -- Dorianne Laux (judge, 2008 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry) |
| Then, a Thousand Crows (2009, by Keith Ratzlaff) |
 What could it mean to be gentle in an era of ill omen and terror? Ask Jesus or Mahatma Gandhi. Ask the omni-genius da Vinci, of whom Keith Ratzlaff writes, "In his last great studies / Leonardo sketched the heart / as a cathedral, its vaults and arches / perfect in their calibrations." Ask Ratzlaff himself, who -- like Leonardo -- makes art "as if beauty might be / a graceful house for the blood / and so calm its turbulence." Then, a Thousand Crows brings no easy answers, but instead the steely thing we must have to face the difficult questions: a guarded hope. -- Stephen Corey, Georgia Review |
| Younger Than Neil (2009, by Earl S. Braggs) |
 Nothing changes until it's changed in everyone's memories. Earl S. Braggs remembers and records his experience, protesting America's attempt to make him smaller than these large, vivid, Kerouacian, music-saturated poems. The reader is returned, through repetition's felicities -- the epic extension of the moment of composition -- inward to our national soul. -- Alice Notley |
Forthcoming titles
| Blood Writing (2009, by Sean Sexton) |
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| The Diamond Dog (2010, by Diane Wakoski) |
 The Diamond Dog, Diane Wakoski’s 19th collection, calls into being a world where the scientific and the mytho-poetic interact and combine. Here, in her first collection of entirely new work since Argonaut Rose (1998), planets move in the perturbed ellipses of warped, Einsteinian space. Yet too, in the realm of the Diamond Dog, stars still turn in their Ptolemaic spheres. Here, the air can be Linden green, Lorca green, and the stem of a carnation can be the line on an astronomer’s spectrograph, the signature of oxygen in some distant star. Though these intricately-written poems chase outward across innumerable landscapes -- the streets of New York City, the glacier fields north of Juneau, a kitchen on the day of a dinner party, a collapsed star made entirely of diamond, the island of Crete, the kingdom of Colchis, Plato’s cave, a Midwestern college campus, an empty avenue on an afternoon in Majorca -- everything about these poems pulls back toward a center, toward "crystal packed into point." It is a story of separation, absence, and of the Diamond Dog itself, an emissary, searching out what has been lost to the poet. |
| One Island (2010/Anhinga Prize for Poetry, by Gretchen Steele Pratt) |
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