Annal:2002 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.52
Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for “wise, original, and often deeply moving” poems that “ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving” (The New York Times). Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to…
- 2002 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 18.52
Louise Glück has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle’s metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and crude. The Seven Ages is Glück’s ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible—an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild…
The Beforelife: Poems
- 2002 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.52
In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love—both divine and human—and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company.
Whether he is…
