Susan Howe has won Yale University's Bollingen Prize for Poetry, which honors an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry, the Buffalo News reported. Previous recipients include Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Adrienne Rich.
Of Howe’s most recent collection, the judges observed: "Susan Howe is a fierce elegist. That This, prompted by the sudden death of the poet's husband, makes manifest the raw edges of elegy through the collision of verse and prose, visionary lyricism and mundane incident, ekphrasis, visual patterning, and the reclamation of historical documents. The book culminates in a set of luminous and starkly condensed lyrics moving increasingly toward silence."