The 120th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the voice felt twice-once in the body, once in the world

Isabel Neal's prizewinning volume bears with confidence its central tensions between beauty and the unseen, contact and the mysterious, arrival and undoing. Both tender and forceful in their curiosity, these poems are vocally sharp, strange, freely moving and then utterly still. Thrown Voice travels along the poet's image-worlds and beloved waterways in wholly unexpected ways: "A thaw thunders loose / Just one mink darkens the ice / A live ampersand."

About the Author

Isabel Neal is a poet, writer, and teacher living in Maine. She is the recipient of fellowships from Lighthouse Works, the James Merrill House, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. This is her first collection. Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.

Reviews

"Like no other book I've read by a young writer. She is interested in what the world is doing when we aren't there to see it. . . . One could picture Neal as a kind of minimalist troubadour poet-one whose beloved is the very land and water. A subtle eroticism is spread broadly but also thinly over the surface of the earth."-Rae Armantrout, from the Foreword

Neal's lyric is a voice thrown outward 'like a net.' Entangled in her 'held / and holding word,' thought, sensation, and place reticulate, patterned precisely. This is visionary ecology, full of 'haptic sight.'"-Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man

Book Information
ISBN 9780300285062
Author Isabel Neal
Format Paperback
Page Count 100
Imprint Yale University Press
Publisher Yale University Press