Tasker Street (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Tasker Street, winner of the Juniper Prize for poetry, is the second collection of poems by the acclaimed American poet Mark Halliday. Following his debut, Little Star (1987), which was selected for the National Poetry Series, Tasker Street confirmed Halliday as one of the most distinctive and engaging voices in contemporary American poetry.

Halliday's poems are marked by a restless, probing intelligence and a distinctly conversational energy. The poems in Tasker Street are personal in tone, narrative in impulse, and unafraid to range widely across the textures of everyday life: relationships, memory, desire, self-doubt, ambition, and the comic absurdities of being alive. These are poems that think out loud, circling back on themselves with a self-awareness that is at once disarming and deeply serious, even as they entertain with wit, verbal dexterity, and a refusal to settle for easy resolutions.

Drawing on the traditions of Frank O'Hara's personism and the narrative directness of the New York School, yet infused with a philosophical attentiveness honed by Halliday's scholarly engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the poems in Tasker Street balance accessibility with intellectual ambition. They invite readers into a voice that is simultaneously intimate and performative, one that embraces digression, self-interrogation, and the pleasures of language even while confronting questions of mortality, meaning, and the stubborn persistence of the self.

MARK HALLIDAY is the author of Little Star (a National Poetry Series Selection), Selfwolf, and Stevens and the Interpersonal. Halliday has taught at Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, Wilmington Friends School, Indiana University, Western Michigan University, and Ohio University, where he has been since 1996.