Award for poetry

WINNER

World Ball Notebook by Sesshu Foster

Sesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook is a tour de force of the wide shot and the close-up. On the “world ball” field, the actions of governments ricochet off each other and their citizens; simultaneously, the moves each individual makes in her life produce private effects and global reverberations. Very few contemporary writers have captured with such skill and feeling the specific geography and register of Los Angeles—its relentless highways, urban milieu, mixes of peoples and languages, various local struggles--and its inextricability from much larger geographical, political and human landscapes that stretch from the American West to Central and South America to Asia. Past and present and future constitute their own playing fields, too. What distinguishes World Ball Notebook from an array of contemporary poetry books is the capaciousness of Foster’s vision, one that never generalizes or makes reductive, and his empathetic respect for the individual characters whose lives might otherwise be lost to history.
-Dorothy Wang, Judge for the Poetry category of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Awards

FINALISTS

Beasts For The Chase by Monica Ferrell

Monica Ferrell’s Beasts for the Chase tantalizes with its ornate imagery and the fantastic creatures that populate an untamed wilderness.  At the center of this luminous dream-like cosmos, a sleepy lyric speaker awakes to a gothic landscape, filled with sacred hunts and ritual harvests.   A journey begins, taking readers through time and space as figures from ancient Greece and Egypt emerge to offer more questions and more complications for our heroine.  The poetry collection brilliantly enraptures us with this fairytale quest for enlightenment, ending only with a desire to continually excavate the self, an archaeological dig where context can be found: “Somewhere in this world I will understand my life.”
-Stephen H. Sohn, Judge for the Poetry category of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Awards

An Aquarium by Jeffrey Yang

Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium is a marvelous and erudite collection of poems.  The collection is an alphabetically-ordered bestiary of aquatic animals that includes the usual cast of crabs, sea horses, and jellyfish but also includes the unexpected Google, intelligent design, and Vishnu.  Each poem is a delicately phrased passage of witty and learned associations; a poem may include the Latin etymology of the sea animal’s name, historical trivia, biological arcana, and stunning leaps of poetic meditation.  In one sense, the abecedarian sequence may reflect how our consciousness has been affected by the ways we define, classify and gather data in this information age.  But while the poems may be concerned with naming, they also draw unexpected connections between natural and man-made phylums, braiding together the life of an aquarium with Philosophy, Environmentalism and Geopolitics.  These poems are reminiscent of Inger Christensen in their endless inventiveness, simultaneous intimacy and expansive global scope.
-Cathy Park Hong, Judge for the Poetry category of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Awards