Liver (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

The poems in Liver come at the reader from many angles at once, like a whirlwind or a warm shower. Charles Harper Webb is a poet of contradictions: humor and heartbreak, depth and accessibility, playfulness and seriousness, raw energy and careful craft. His poems glorify the spirit, but also the flesh, exemplified by the liver, the “organ whose name contains the injunction Live!… great One-Who-Lives, so we can too.” Even at their darkest, their most outraged and sorrowing, Webb’s poems affirm the world, and help us live in it gladly.

Winner of the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Selected by Robert Bly