Thrown Voice

The 120th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the voice felt twice―once in the body, once in the world

Isabel Neal’s prizewinning volume bears with confidence its central tensions between beauty and the unseen, contact and the mysterious, arrival and undoing. Both tender and forceful in their curiosity, these poems are vocally sharp, strange, freely moving and then utterly still. Thrown Voice travels along the poet’s image-worlds and beloved waterways in wholly unexpected ways: “A thaw thunders loose / Just one mink darkens the ice / A live ampersand.”

Isabel Neal is a poet, writer, and teacher living in Maine. She is the recipient of fellowships from Lighthouse Works, the James Merrill House, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. This is her first collection. Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.