Kirjahaku

The 96th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Sean Singer’s Discography. Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced, the poems in this book delight in sound and approach the more abstract pleasures of music. Singer takes as his subjects music, jazz figures, and historical events. Series judge W. S. Merwin praises Singer for his “roving demands on his language” and the “quick-changes of his invention in search of some provisional rightness.”

Sean Singer’s second book of poems uses a range of hybrid forms including lyric poetry, long lines, nonfiction non-poetry, and lyrical essay to address the ghosts of history: historical figures, the lives of other writers, jazz music, and writing itself. The poems show humor, intimacy, and a range of voices; language and music of obsession; the meaning of creative energy. Sean Singer was born in Mexico in 1974. His first book Discography won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has published two chap-books with Beard of Bees Press, Passport and Keep Right on Playing Through the Mirror Over the Water. He is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers-Newark. He lives in New York City.

Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive… I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn… Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.—Laurie Sheck