The 120th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the voice felt twice—once in the body, once in the world
Isabel Neal’s prizewinning volume bears with confidence its central tensions between beauty and the unseen, contact and the mysterious, arrival and undoing. These are poems that are vocally sharp, strange, freely moving and then utterly still, both tender and forceful in their curiosity. Thrown Voice travels—along the poet’s image worlds and beloved waterways—in utterly unexpected ways: “A thaw thunders loose / Just one mink darkens the ice / A live ampersand.”