Annal:2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 2007 Griffin International shortlist
- 2006 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.56
From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from “the most frightening American poet ever” (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.56
Black Box is a raw, intense book, fueled by a devastating infidelity. With her marriage shattered, Belieu sifts the wreckage for the black box, the record of disaster. Propelled by a blistering and clarifying rage, she composed at fever pitch and produced riveting, unforgettable poems.
When Belieu was invited by the Poetry Foundation to keep a public journal on their new website, readers responded to the Black Box poems, calling them “dark, twisted, disturbed, and disturbing” and Belieu a “frightening genius.” All true.
Burning Wyclif: Poems
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.56
Sometimes you have to raise the body up to burn it down. So it was with Wyclif, who rested forty-two years under chancel stone condemned by the Papacy, protected by the Crown. Finally, a bishop came with a few men, spades, shovels, a horse and cart. By then, not much was left of Wyclif—hair and skin gone, his bones slipped out of place inside the simple alb they’d buried him in. The bishop gathered what he could. Beside the River Swift, he lit a pile of wood and tossed the bones on one at a time, cursing the heretic from limb to limb. Afterwards, they shoveled ash into the water and no one even thought the word martyr.
Darling Vulgarity: Poems
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.56
With both ardor and sensuality, Darling Vulgarity challenges us to embrace humanity’s imperfections while urging us toward new spiritual realities. And then, sometimes, the poems are just plain sexy. Or, as Nat Hardy wrote, “Waters’ meditative and confessional forays into the sexual sublime are both disturbing and artfully passionate.”
Darling Vulgarity also includes poems based on Waters’ true literary experiences with such notables as Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell.
Logorrhea: Poems
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.56
In a torrent of rage, love, and irony, Adrian C. Louis explodes all the myths and hypocrisy of Middle America in the twenty-first century. This is how Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsburg might have written about our post-9/11 world—where the realities of poverty on Indian reservations and the plight of Hurricane Katrina victims come in second place to the vagaries of Homeland Security. For Louis, both he and our nation face an uncertain future. He writes as if he has nothing left to lose but then fills the page with bittersweet sorrow for everything that has been lost. Armed with unforgettable images, relentless rhythms, and a dark and scathing humor, Louis takes aim at this American life.
