2019 UNT Rilke Prize Goes to David Keplinger

The University of North Texas's Department of English has chosen David Keplinger and his poetry collection Another City as the recipient of the prestigious Rilke Prize. Awarded annually, the prize goes to book by a mid-career poet published in the preceding year "that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision." From there: 

A Q&A and reception for Keplinger will be held on Wednesday, April 3, at UNT on the Square and a campus reading will take place on
Thursday, April 4, 2019.

“But death is not the subject of our portrait,” writes David Keplinger in the opening poem of Another City, as if to suggest the book’s meditations on mortality and wounded dissatisfaction are equally haunted by metaphysical longing and the vast otherworld in the near at hand. To arrive in a body, through the body of another, is to feel its suffering as the echo, however distant, of our own. The cough of a dying mother could travel miles and yet arrive with a sharpened sense of its smallness, and hers, poised on the brink of the invisible. In poems of such keen attentions and imaginative wit, the intimation of always another city registers both an awareness of our inevitable diminishment and the possibility of some vaster sphere, some landscape of domes and illuminations, to mitigate our loneliness and loss. “Nothing was itself alone,” he writes. “In this way, it all grew larger.”

David Keplinger is a poet and translator. His collections of poems include The Most Natural Thing, The Prayers of Others, The Clearing, The Rose Inside and, most recently, Another City. His translations include Carsten René Nielsen’s World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors and House Inspections, a Lannan Translations Selection; his most recent translation is Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary. Keplinger’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, and The Writer’s Almanac, and has been translated and included in anthologies in China, Germany, Denmark, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Keplinger has received support from the Soros Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the D.C. Council on Arts and Humanities, and the Danish Council on the Arts. He has also received the T.S. Eliot Award, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International and The Erksine Poetry Prize from Smartish Place. Keplinger teaches in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, DC.

Learn more via the University of North Texas.