The Cuckoo: Yale Series of Younger Poets

Announcing the 2003 recipient of the oldest annual literary prize in North America

The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus’s The Cuckoo, chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Glück. It is Glück’s first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Glück praises Streckfus’s art for its “nonsense and mystery,” its “mesmerizing beauty” and “luminous high-mindedness.”