Juliana Spahr won the $10,000 O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, presented annually by Folger Poetry, the poetry program of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her most recent book is The Transformation. Spahr will be honored with a reading and reception at the Folger on Friday, October 9.
"There's a rhyme at the heart of Juliana Spahr's work that suggests her motive and her movement: connective and collective," said Joshua Weiner, one of the judges for this year's prize. "Her lines connect experiences and collect objects in a language that is daring for its plainness, clarity, analysis, self-deprecation, earnestness and irony, its unabashed lyrical phrasing, its unembarrassed willingness to make claims about the relation between self and world, between social consciousness and physical desire."