Synopses & Reviews
Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her volume
It Is Daylight reads as a series of dramatic monologues articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space.
The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail.
In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gluck observes, "I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute." Gluck calls Collins volume "savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable."
Review
"This is a book of dazzling modernity....Caustic, pithy, ruthlessly sharp witted and keen eyed....Devoid of that taste for rhetorical splendor that turns so easily stodgy...." Louise Gluck
Synopsis
Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins' emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gluck observes, "I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute." Gluck calls Collins' volume "savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable."
Synopsis
Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize
Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins' emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gl ck observes, "I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute." Gl ck calls Collins' volume "savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable."
About the Author
Arda Collins lives in Denver, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry. Her poems have been published in journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, A Public Space, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow.