Special Collections
Pulitzer Prize Award Winners
Description: Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles, winners of the Pulitzer Prize Award. Note: Some drama winners are available and are listed under Fiction awards. #award
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Thomas And Beulah
by Rita DoveStory told in poems of the African Amarican poet's grandparents' marriage, migration to Akron, Ohio in the first half of the 20th Century.
Pulitzer Prize 1987.
Life on Mars
by Tracy K. SmithLife on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Selected Poems
by Galway KinnellThe poems include two of Kinnell's most frequently reprinted poems, "Saint Francis and the Sow" and "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" Kinnell draws for his poetry from experiences living in Vermont and New York, as well as from teaching in France, Australia, Iran, and many colleges and universities in this country. Kinnell is now retired from his position as the director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Winner of the National Book Award
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Dream of the Unified Field
by Jorie GrahamThe 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books.
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by John AshberyA collection of poetry by John Ashbery.
Winner of the National Book Award.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Shadow of Sirius
by W. S. MerwinThe nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, temporality, and eternity interweave throughout Merwin's newest collection of poems. "I have only what I remember," he admits, and his memories are focused and profound: well-cultivated loves, the distinct qualities of autumnal light, memories of Pennsylvania miners, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, and "our long evenings and astonishment." From the universe's chiaroscuro shadows, Merwin once again calls upon the language of surprise to illuminate existence. He is writing at the peak of his powers.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Delights and Shadows
by Ted KooserTed Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a “haiku-like imagist” and his poems have been compared to Chekov’s short stories. In Delights and Shadows, Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman’s trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world.
Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Digest
by Gregory PardloFrom Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.
Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Simple Truth
by Philip LevineWritten in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Black Zodiac
by Charles WrightThese are poems suffused with spiritual longing, lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality that also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Entering by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal a truth much larger than the quotidian happening that engendered it.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Ozone Journal
by Peter BalakianThe title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others—the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS—creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Turtle Island
by Gary SnyderWinner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1975). These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of No Nature range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time.
Stag's Leap
by Sharon OldsIn this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip; the radical change in her sense of place in the world. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable "Stag's Leap," "When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver." Olds's propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music--sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry she has yet given us.
Time and Materials
by Robert HassThe poems in Robert Hass's new collection-his first to appear in a decade-are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.
His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.
The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czeslaw Milosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surprisingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and everything else, into his poetry."
Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Poetry, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Repair
by C. K. WilliamsRepair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence".
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Alive Together
by Lisel MuellerIn a collection that represents over thirty-five years of her writing life, this distinguished poet explores a wide range of subjects, which include her cultural and family history and reflect her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language. In fact, her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality - "the hard, dry smack of death against the glass." To this community Mueller presents moments after moment where the personal and public realms intersect, where lives ranging from her own to those of Mary Shelley and Anton Webern illuminate the ways in which history shapes our lives. In "Brendel Playing Schubert," Mueller's breathtaking linguistic virtuosity reminds us how music can transport us out of ourselves and into "the nowhere where the enchanted live"; in "Midwinter Notes," the crepuscular world, stripped of its veil, shines forth as a signal from some realm where the sense of things may be revealed. In the title piece Mueller brings a sense of enduring and unclouded wonder to a recognition of all those whose lives might have been our own.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Neon Vernacular
by Yusef KomunyakaaABOUT THE AUTHOR: Yusef Komunyakaa is a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University. He is the author of five Wesleyan titles including the Pulitzer-winning Neon Vernacular (1993), which also won the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award from the Claremont Graduate School, Thieves of Paradise (1998), Magic City (1992), and Dien Cai Dau (1988). In 1991 he won the Thomas Forcade Award, in 1993 he was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and in 1997 he was awarded the Hanes Poetry Prize.
Late Wife
by Claudia EmersonIn Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples' respective losses. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The World Doesn't End
by Charles SimicIn this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.
The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
by Howard NemerovThe former Poet Laureate of the United States, Nemerov gives us a lucid and precise twist on the commonplaces of everyday life.The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. "Howard Nemerov is a witty, urbane, thoughtful poet, grounded in the classics, a master of the craft. It is refreshing to read his work. . . . "—Minneapolis Tribune "The world causes in Nemerov a mingled revulsion and love, and a hopeless hope is the most attractive quality in his poems, which slowly turn obverse to reverse, seeing the permanence of change, the vices of virtue, the evanescence of solidities and the errors of truth."—Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review
Moy Sand and Gravel
by Paul MuldoonPaul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since 1998, finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, an unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2003.
The Wild Iris
by Louise GlückThis collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Live or Die
by Anne SextonWinner of the Pulitzer Prize: A gripping poetry collection mapping the thorny journey from madness to hope With her emotionally raw and deeply resonant third collection, Live or Die, Anne Sexton confirmed her place among the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Sexton described the volume, which depicts a fictionalized version of her struggle with mental illness, as "a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy." From the halls of a psychiatric hospital--"the scene of the disordered scenes" in "Flee on Your Donkey"--to a child's playroom--"a graveyard full of dolls" in "Those Times . . ."--these gripping poems offer profound insight on the agony of depression and the staggering acts of courage and faith required to emerge from its depths. Along with other confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Sexton was known for grappling with intimate subjects traditionally considered taboo for poetry such as motherhood, menstruation, and drug dependence. Live or Die features these topics in candid and unflinching detail, as Sexton represents the full experience of being alive--and a woman--as few poets have before. Through bold images and startlingly precise language, Sexton explores the broad spectrum of human emotion ranging from desperate despair to unfettered hope.