Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize

Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gluck observes, I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute. Gluck calls Collins’ volume savage, desolate, brutally ironic … a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.