2019 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
by Forrest Gander
Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section — a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's — rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane."
The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University each spring since 1917. The awards are chosen by a board of jurors for Journalism, Letters, Music and Drama. The awards for Letters include Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography or Autobiography, History, and Fiction.