Information Desk: An Epic by Robyn Schiff (Penguin Poets) has won the $20,000 2024 Four Quartets Prize, which honors "a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book" and is sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America.
Finalists, who each receive $1,000, were The Orange Tree by Dong Li (University of Chicago Press) and West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal (Copper Canyon Press).
Judges said that Information Desk "wanders the halls of both the physical space of the museum and the interior movements of the mind. It lives in the unknown questionings that are punctuated by almost obsessive meditations on the lives of wasps as she speaks of art, power, family, imagination, the ways in which a life is constructed as meaning is constructed.
"Both the syntax and the interventions of the linebreaks keep us moving forward but encountering surprise after surprise, whether it be anecdotal memory, historical fact or meditations on the making of art ('art history explains/this is how/to micromanage an optimal viewing distance from the eye'). Though the title and subject may sound institutional, the narrative veers off into eros, lushness, beauty, the lack of boundary between the self and the subjects that surround us. Roaming the halls of the museum, Schiff is attuned to the trespasses that attend to power, collecting, curating, and the abuses and injustices of capitalism. 'I could steer one on one’s way toward/something else. The digressions /are endless.' The digressions are, in fact, the pleasures of these long, fractal sentences.
"These poems transform the museum into a microcosm of both the high and the low, the symbols of power and the objects borne of affections, the dangers and the delights of human endeavor. The ingenious thinking--the shaping of these artifacts as narrative of both the arc of history and the intimacy of the mind when left to meditate and imagine their uses--is what gives this collection its soul, its urgency. Schiff is a docent enthralled and enthralling, intimate with all that surrounds her and ready to draw you into her world, into her captivating mind."
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Finalists have been selected for the $10,000 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, recognizing the best books "with a horse racing backdrop." The winner's ceremony will be held November 7. The finalists:
Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey by Katherine C. Mooney about the winner of three Kentucky Derbys born during slavery who is considered one of the best jockeys of all time.
Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America's Legendary Racehorse by Kim Wickens about the mid-19th century champion Lexington.
The Turcottes: The Remarkable Story of a Horse Racing Dynasty by Curtis Stock about the five jockey brothers who included Ron Turcotte, who rode Secretariat to his Triple Crown in 1973.