Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism

Douglas Kearney is the 2023 recipient for his book Optic Subwoof, a collection of talks Kearney presented as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. Through an avant-garde sensibility, this collection explores the intersections of Black poetics, violence, and performance.

Kearney is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of eight books ranging from poetry to essays to libretti. Among his honors are fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and McKnight, as well as receiving the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, the Whiting Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Finalists

The 2023 Finalists were Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb for Auden and the Muse of History, Carl Phillips for My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, and Katherine Rundell for Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.

Thank you to the 2023 judges: Elizabeth LeRud, Kevin Quashie, and Gillian White.

Kevin Quashie is the 2022 recipient for his book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, which draws on Black feminist literary texts, including work by poets Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan.

Quashie teaches Black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. Among his honors are a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as citations for teaching excellence from Brown University and Smith College.

Finalists

The 2022 Criticism finalists were Anahid Nersessian for Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse (The University of Chicago Press) and Syd Zolf for No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke University Press).

Susan Briante (she/her) receives the award for Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics, and the state. Examining migration and the fraught bureaucracies of the US-Mexico border, Briante delivers a provocative meditation on what official records reveal or obscure. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.”

Briante is also the author of poetry collections: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders, all published by Ahsahta Press. Her awards include honors from the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture.

Finalists

The 2021 Criticism finalists were editor Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro for Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe, and Rosanna Warren for Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters.

Saskia Hamilton’s deft editing and expertise are apparent in her two books, The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle and The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 Robert Lowell paints an unparalleled picture of the last years of Lowell’s life. The Dolphin Letters travels through the correspondence between Hardwick and Lowell, on which Lowell’s controversial poem “The Dolphin” is based. Two Versions revisits the poem at length, and includes scans of the original manuscript, giving readers a new understanding of the Pulitzer Prize winning piece.

The author of four poetry collections, most recently Corridor, Hamilton has also edited or coedited four works of scholarship on Robert Lowell, including the winning books.

Finalists

Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry by Peter Campion
Animal by Dorothea Lasky
The Long Public Life of a Short American Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt by Peter Murphy

Saskia Hamilton’s deft editing and expertise are apparent in her two books, The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle and The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 Robert Lowell paints an unparalleled picture of the last years of Lowell’s life. The Dolphin Letters travels through the correspondence between Hardwick and Lowell, on which Lowell’s controversial poem “The Dolphin” is based. Two Versions revisits the poem at length, and includes scans of the original manuscript, giving readers a new understanding of the Pulitzer Prize winning piece.

The author of four poetry collections, most recently Corridor, Hamilton has also edited or coedited four works of scholarship on Robert Lowell, including the winning books.

Finalists

Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry by Peter Campion
Animal by Dorothea Lasky
The Long Public Life of a Short American Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt by Peter Murphy

Based on his Bagley Wright lectures, Terrance Hayes’s To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight expands the concept of criticism into a conversation with the work that forms his subject. This adventurous book takes the reader on a journey with its author to rediscover Knight’s work, including photos and drawings by Hayes to accompany its powerful prose.

“Etheridge Knight is an important poet, especially now, as we think about incarceration in the US,” said Poetry magazine editor Don Share. “Only a poet as skillful in his own right as Terrance Hayes could reimagine Knight’s body of work in such a distinctive, poignant, and timely way.”

Finalists

Cathay: A Critical Edition by Timothy Billings
The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance by Philip Metres
Stolen Life by Fred Moten
If You're Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change by Tom Wayman

Liesl Olson’s Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis both documents and celebrates the central role Chicago played in the birth of Anglo-American literary modernism. Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Gwendolyn Brooks and many others take their place alongside important but less-recognized figures (book sellers, journalists, and general readers among them) who revolutionized literature during the first half of the twentieth century in ways that are still unfolding today.

Poetry editor Don Share says, “As pleasurable to read as it is meticulously researched, Chicago Renaissance tells the story of how ‘without sacrificing intellectual or aesthetic integrity,’ Chicago modernists successfully connected with mainstream readers, those Olson aptly calls ‘readers in the middle.’"

This critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s Poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909–1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot’s astonishing debut, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As well as the masterpieces, the edition contains the poems of Eliot’s youth, which were rediscovered only decades later, others that circulated privately during his lifetime, and love poems from his final years, written for his wife Valerie Eliot.

Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the imaginative life of each poem. Calling upon Eliot’s critical writings, as well as his drafts, letters, and other original materials, they illustrate not only the breadth of Eliot’s interests and the range of his writings, but how it was that the author of “Gerontion” came to write “Triumphal March” and then Four Quartets. Thanks to the family and friends who recognized Eliot’s genius and preserved his writings from an early age, the archival record is exceptionally complete, enabling us to follow in unique detail the progress of a mind that never ceased exploring.

Poetry editor Don Share praises the volumes: “The authoritative and remarkable editing of the poems of T.S. Eliot by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue is unprecedented; their work illuminates every one of Eliot’s poems in ways unimaginable until now. This work will remain invaluable to readers and students of poetry for many generations.”

Eyewear Publishing, Mark Ford’s This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray, published in 2014.

“If more literary criticism were like this,” John Lanchester said of Ford’s essays, “more people would read it.” The 13 vivid, lucid, refreshing, and unfailingly surprising pieces in his collection range from the canonical (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot) to the overlooked (James Thomson, Samuel Greenberg, and Joan Murray). Randall Jarrell believed that a critic writing at his or her best makes people see what they might otherwise never have seen; in this enriching and rewarding book, Ford is at his very best.

Finalists

Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, by Paul Celan, translated and edited by Pierre Joris
James Merrill: Life and Art, by Langdon Hammer
Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation, by Khaled Mattawa
The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap
Where Have You Been? Selected Essays, by Michael Hofmann

Awarded for The Collected Later Poems and Plays, and The Collected Essays and Other Prose by Robert Duncan. Part of The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan Series, the books, published earlier this year, were edited by Peter Quartermain and James Maynard, respectively, and published by the University of California.

Robert Duncan has become a central figure in our understanding of 20th-century American poetics. These two critical editions represent a major achievement in textual scholarship, bringing together Duncan’s authoritative texts and unpublished works. The result is an extraordinary look into the development and evolution of Duncan’s distinct and groundbreaking poetics. Editors Peter Quartermain and James Maynard deftly navigate Duncan’s textual complexities, while providing extensive notes, annotations, and commentaries on Duncan’s career and works. Special recognition is also extended to other books in this series—The Collected Early Poems and Plays (edited by Peter Quatermain) and The H.D. Book (edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman)—as well as Lisa Jarnot’s biography, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus. The University of California Press series as a whole brings his role into further focus and will ensure Duncan’s importance as a poet and critic for current and future generations.

Awarded for The Collected Later Poems and Plays, and The Collected Essays and Other Prose by Robert Duncan. Part of The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan Series, the books, published earlier this year, were edited by Peter Quartermain and James Maynard, respectively, and published by the University of California.

Robert Duncan has become a central figure in our understanding of 20th-century American poetics. These two critical editions represent a major achievement in textual scholarship, bringing together Duncan’s authoritative texts and unpublished works. The result is an extraordinary look into the development and evolution of Duncan’s distinct and groundbreaking poetics. Editors Peter Quartermain and James Maynard deftly navigate Duncan’s textual complexities, while providing extensive notes, annotations, and commentaries on Duncan’s career and works. Special recognition is also extended to other books in this series—The Collected Early Poems and Plays (edited by Peter Quatermain) and The H.D. Book (edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman)—as well as Lisa Jarnot’s biography, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus. The University of California Press series as a whole brings his role into further focus and will ensure Duncan’s importance as a poet and critic for current and future generations.