Sonnets to the Humans (Sawtooth Poetry Prize)

Poetry. Winner of the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. "This is a wizard's handiwork.... SONNETS TO THE HUMANS stands as one unstoppered bottle for a host of genii, lightning-Nimrods, angel-demons, Ænglisch as demotic, ash as egg. It's a brilliant, intimate, intricate, careening, calibrating, strangely moving collection of 49 poems—pieces introduced and linked by patches of the prose narration of 'a fictional poet who lived in the 21st century' and bore the name of Vishvamitra.... Thus we embark, in part, on an old story—but one re-generated here in ways unheralded, unheard-of. It becomes a futuristic lover's lyrical lament and a recapitulation (or enactment) of the Babel tale; (even thus largely to restrict its scope can only be reductive: it's a book with a very long half-life)."—Heather McHugh, judge of the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize