Award Winners

2022 Shelley Memorial Award

Joyelle McSweeney


Selected by Rick Barot and Calvin Bedient

In Toxicon (published last year in tandem with its epilogue, Arachne, on a newborn’s death), Joyelle McSweeney emerged with a genius for assault that was no longer carnivalesque (as in Percussion Grenade, 2012) but, instead, tragic. She joined the small party of the great poets of the disease and evil of being, and not just of the human being, pathetically evil, but that of the cosmos, which even the molecules, in one of her poems, ask to be excused from, but no dice. The sheer scope of the book’s powerful indictments is breathtaking. Nothing is safe from her rhetoric, which wrings necks.

Nonetheless, the poems of Toxicon are shapely, if far more ready to splatter than the neat stanzas of The Red Bird (2002). Where Percussion Grenade all but required parataxis, Toxicon tightens up formally against invasive things, everything toxic, corrupting, spoiling, devastating. Writing like a champion boxer, with clean, sharp jabs, is what gets you through. The force of her lines, her imagination’s daring, her phrasing’s shuddering vigor, are exhilarating.

No one would write so tragically beyond pity, so on the offense, except from profound grief that the gentle qualities that people have lived and died for are trodden bested by the violence in things. But weeping, defeat––these are not allowed. The thing is to be the Anti-, the Excoriator, the Equal to. McSweeney has an extreme sensitivity to being pressured, come at, taken advantage of. Even dawn is a terrible ordeal: comes the sun’s detonations. But it is this abnormality that makes her alert to every bullying thing.

—Calvin Bedient


All Winners

2021

2020

2014

Bernadette Mayer

2013

Lucia Perillo
Martín Espada

2012

Wanda Coleman

2011

Rigoberto González
Joan Larkin

2010

Kenneth Irby
Eileen Myles

2009

Ron Padgett
Gary Young

2008

Ed Roberson

2007

Kimiko Hahn

2006

George Stanley

2005

Lyn Hejinian

2004

Yusef Komunyakaa

2003

James McMichael

2002

Angela Jackson
Marie Ponsot

2001

Alice Notley
Michael Palmer

2000

Jean Valentine

1999

Tom Sleigh

1998

Eleanor Ross Taylor

1997

Frank Bidart

1996

Robert Pinsky
Anne Waldman

1995

Stanley Kunitz

1994

Kenneth Koch
Cathy Song

1993

Josephine Jacobsen

1992

Lucille Clifton

1991

Shirley Kaufman

1990

Thom Gunn

1989

Thomas McGrath
Theodore Weiss

1988

Dennis Schmitz

1987

Mona Van Duyn

1986

Gary Snyder

1985

Etheridge Knight

1984

Robert Duncan
Denise Levertov

1983

Jon Anderson
Leo Connellan

1982

Alan Dugan

1981

Robert Creeley

1980

Julia Randall

1979

Robert Hayden