Winners of the 2011 Iowa Poetry Prize—Grand & Arsenal by Kerri Webster and Natural Selections by Joseph Campana—are now available from the University of Iowa Press.
The Iowa Poetry Prize, open to new as well as established poets, is awarded for a book-length collection of poems written originally in English.
Idaho poet Webster is author of a previous full-length collection, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, as well as the chapbooks Psalm Project and Rowing through Fog. She was writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006 to 2010
Nikky Finney, the author of Head Off & Split, commented, “Kerri Webster’s voice is oracular, new, and legendary, full of land and weather. Grand & Arsenal rains forth like a liniment, painting the bald-faced human. Her penchant for opposites reminds us that difference is not a contrary thing but first cousin to who we are. When we read this new luminous voice we are led Upriver. This is Big poetry, a very special book where ‘the gods come down to the banks to drink.’”
Campana teaches Renaissance literature at Rice University. His poems have appeared in Slate, the Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, the Colorado Review, and many other venues. His first book of poetry, The Book of Faces, was published in 2005. He is also author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity.
Dan Beachy-Quick, the editor of the Colorado Review, wrote, "Joseph Campana’s Natural Selections gently reminds us of the brutal fact that the mythic world remains present in this one. Subtly inverting the Orpheus myth, Campana suffers his beloved’s loss—a division that leads not to an underworld quest, but to wandering the rural roads of Ohio, where the poet does not sing so that the world hears him, but more humbly, more importantly, sings so as to listen to the world."
The books are available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or http://www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at http://www.eurospanbookstore.com.