In the Permanent Collection

Praise for Prize Winners

59 Praise for Previous Winners of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry Club Icarus, by Matt W. Miller “A down-to-earth intelligence and an acute alertness to the gritty movement of language are what you’ll treasure most in Matt Miller’s Club Icarus. You just might pass this book on to a friend or relative who needs it, or even better yet, purchase their own copy.” —Major Jackson, author of Holding Company and judge “In Matt Miller’s deeply satisfying collection, there is a visceral longing that cannot be ignored, a surrender to the body’s fate but also a warring against it. There is the tenacious blood-grief for the lost father but also the deeply abiding yet fearful love of the new father. At the heart of these wonderful poems is a naked wrestling with all those forces that both wither life and give it bloom, those that rob us and those that save us.” —Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog “In a stunning array throughout Matt W. Miller’s remarkable Club Icarus are instances of the kind of poetic alchemy that coaxes beauty and a rather severe grace out of the most obdurate materials and unlikely contexts. Here is a poet in whose artful hands language has become an instrument that enables us to know the world again and, simultaneously, as if for the first time.” —B. H. Fairchild, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry “In Club Icarus the universal themes of birth and death, love and loss—are woven together with a luminous, transcendent brush. This book is a sly and beautiful performance.” —Marilyn Chin, author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow Death of a Ventriloquist, by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc “Whether he’s overhearing a conversation in a tavern or the music stuck in his head, Fay-LeBlanc uses his ventriloquist to raise important questions about how we perform ourselves through language. 60 The tension that permeates his poetry—what is seen and unseen, said and eavesdropped, true and trickery—culminates in a debut that rings out long after Fay-LeBlanc’s lips stop moving.” —Publishers Weekly starred review “What drives the poems in this wonderfully animated debut volume and prompts the reader’s pleasure in them is the patent honesty of the poet’s voice. In the ‘ventriloquist’ series itself, Fay-LeBlanc creates a remarkable refracted self-portrait, bristling with moments of unabashed illumination.” —Eamon Grennan, author of Out of Sight “In the words of visual artist Paul Klee, ‘art doesn’t reproduce what we can see, it makes it visible.’ The turf of these poems is a ‘vision country’ in which our narrator/ventriloquist makes visible (and audible) the world to which he restlessly attends.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Satin Cash and judge “Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a new poet with an old voice. The ventriloquist here throws his own voice while sitting on his own knee, speaking for, but not to, himself, making magic in (and of) plain sight.” —Brenda Shaughnessy author of Human Dark with Sugar Circles Where the Head Should Be, by Caki Wilkinson “Playful and soulful, buoyant and mordant, snazzy and savvy—Caki Wilkinson’s poems pull out all the stops, and revel in making the old mother tongue sound like a bright young thing. Lend her your ears and you’ll hear American lyric moxie in all its abounding gusto and lapidary glory, making itself new all over again.” —David Barber, Poetry Editor, The Atlantic “Circles Where the Head Should Be has its own distinctive voice, a lively intelligence, insatiable curiosity, and a decided command of form. These qualities play off one another in ways that instruct and delight. An irresistible book.” —J. D. McClatchy, author of Mercury Dressing: Poems, judge “Caki Wilkinson’s marvelous and marvelously titled Circles Where the Head Should Be contains poetry as dexterously written as any 61 today. And beneath its intricate surface pleasures lie a fierce intelligence and a relentless imagination constantly discovering connections where none had been seen before. This is a stunning debut.” —John Koethe, author of Ninety-fifth Street, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize “Like Frost, Wilkinson believes in poem as performance, showing off her verve and virtuosity. She is the ‘Lady on a Unicycle,’ negotiating her difficult vehicle through the pedestrian crowd with ‘the easy lean achieved/ by holding on to nothing’—a joy to witness...