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This year’s award goes to Jeffrey Yang, author of An Aquarium (Graywolf Press).
In their citation the judges write:
"Jeffrey Yang's masterful first book, An Aquarium, exhibits an almost archaic pleasure-taking in the sounds and textures of words, combined with a postmodern speed. The quickness with which this poet can shift among eras of human history, civilizations, and languages is graceful, exhilarating, dizzying. The (mostly) short poems of the book are organized alphabetically and mostly titled after sea creatures (“Abalone,” “Barnacle,” “Lionfish,” “Manatee,” “Tarpon,” “Zhi-fish”), though with significant exceptions (“Aristotle,” “Google,” “Intelligent Design,” “Rexroth,” “Vacuum”). The combination in An Aquarium of language play, tongue-in-cheek wisdom, fascination with archaic and specific realms of knowledge, and a sincere and committed compassion culminates in the final poem of the book, “Zooxanthellae,” which takes as a great part of its subject the effect of nuclear tests on the indigenous peoples of Bikini Atoll and other islands. The very moving and powerful statement of this book is its highly unusual and unapologetic joining of pure pleasure in language and ideas to an engagement with the troubles of the world." |
