Soul Data: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

"Soul Data is rarely compounded--of wit and music, surface elegance and intellectual depth, quirk and quandary. Its sensual intelligence is on high alert, and the sheer unsheerness of its language--all its densities and textures--is a linguiphiliacal delight. Unmistakeably American (the poetry's occasions and its cadences alike serve for signature) it has the jinx-meister's humors about it. There's a dark streak, too, an eye for the natural indifferences that border the spotlit human heats. A fine rhetorical savvy, in a mind inclined to the chillier depths: among poetic gifts these days it's an uncommon conjunction, a gift of mysteries, like the sight (across a night pond's surface) of bright-blue shooting star: one hopes the other humans get to see it."--Heather McHugh

V Linoleum]

South of Spokane Street, a gear works
turns its teeth--shadows in a cavern,
through the cycles of a drop-forge piston,
heft themselves and recoil in a dark
rain of sparks, the echo off the blocks--
pa-tang --arriving late, repeats itself again,
a ceaseless, a remorseless hammering home,
a point made and lost in the patterns of work.
Across the street, a hunkered stretch of houses,
swing sets and cyclone fencing, a clatch of cars.
The agent shrugs--"It's zoned Residential/
Light Industrial"--pa-tong A lunatic fringe
of gladiolus fronts the walkways and the rows
of empty rooms we roll by at low idle.