Arda Collins

Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins' emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gl ck observes, "I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute." Gl ck calls Collins' volume "savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable."

It is Daylight

Star Lake by Arda Collins Arda Collins's second book of poems, STAR LAKE, is a deeply personal collection that explores the ways our notions of daily life touch the presence of the eternal. With memory as the backdrop of many poems, including the loss of the poet's parents and her experience growing up in a family of survivors from the Armenian genocide, Collins often overlays images of landscapes, weather, and domestic interiors with a tone of melancholy--"Who is the water and who is the light? / A shiver, a love, one you miss, and a wish." But STAR LAKE is also a collection of love poems, poems about the creation of new memories with family, tracing out imaginative shapes for their futures. In this Yale Younger Poets award winner's second collection of poems, Collins returns with truly unforgettable poems that haunt and comfort. "In spare, riveting lines, Arda Collins's new poems enact a torque between immediacy and distance, between a visceral near--"An orange in the dark / is like lake air at night," and a resplendent far--"Down the boulevard--Versailles is everywhere." Against the shadows of Armenian genocide and family deaths, the speaker's calls to "come in the window" or "come to time" are less commands than invocations and the ground for stunning evocations. This is a book of wonders."--Arthur Sze "More than just a book, STAR LAKE is a tactile experience. A touchable journey wherein each stanza, each image comes to life before a reader. When the wind is summoned in the poem, a breeze blows in through a window you didn't even know you had open. All to say that this is a book of immense brilliance and immense possibility. Beckoning with new revelations around each corner."--Hanif Abdurraqib Poetry.

Arda Collins

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