Yale Younger Poets Has Spoken: Airea D. Matthews's Manuscript simulacra Is the Winner of This Year's Prestigious Prize

Carl Phillips, who judged this year's competition, has this to say about Matthews's prize-winning manuscript, simulacra: "Rebellion is the first word that comes to mind, when reading simulacra, Airea Matthews’s rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant debut." Savvy readers unfamiliar with Matthews's poetry may have come across her editorial work for The Offing—a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. Furthermore, Matthews is both a Cave Canem and a Callaloo Fellow. The Yale Younger Poets Prize is awarded annually to an emerging poet whose work merits distinction; the prize has been presented to poets since 1919. More:

Yale University Press is pleased to announce a winner in the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The judge, prize-winning and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips, has chosen Airea D. Matthews’s manuscript, simulacra.

Series judge Carl Phillips says: “Rebellion is the first word that comes to mind, when reading simulacra, Airea Matthews’s rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant debut. The main rebellion here is against all formal expectations of what a book of poetry is or ‘should’ be – Narcissus communicates by Tweets, Anne Sexton sends texts from death to a recipient who may or may not be dead; there’s a miniature opera; there are upended nods to the epistolary tradition, prose poems, even a Barthes-influenced calculus. The subject matter is no less various – from miscegenation to Gertrude Stein, from estranged love to Wittgenstein — but a particular constant is the theme of wanting: on one hand, wanting as desire, for safety, for faith, for a way to know the self; and on the other hand, wanting as lack, lack both as emptiness and as a motivating force behind the quest for an end to emptiness. And if language itself is empty, and all we have, when it comes to knowing? This is the governing, haunting question behind these always meaningfully provocative poems – poems, yes, but very much, also, poems as epistemology.”

Yale University Press will publish simulacra in April 2017. The manuscript is Phillips’s sixth selection as judge and the 111th volume in the series. Carl Phillips’s fourth selection, Noah Warren’s The Destroyer in the Glass will be published by Yale University Press on March 29, 2016.

Learn more via Yale Younger Poets.