Carolina Ghost Woods: Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas' border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the harshness of her youth with the beauty, inventiveness, and musicality of language. Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death haunt Carolina Ghost Woods, which is set amid the lush landscape of the South and enfolds the wildness -- inclement and consoling by turns -- of nature and agriculture. Jordan, though, reveals compassion as well as passion for her subject matter and the people in her poems, creating lines of hope and chords of ecstatic energy out of despair. She offers a poetry of witness that does not sacrifice the aesthetics of language and rhythm: "Here I bring my sorrows / like the delft blue mussel shells, / fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn wide with loss."