Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

Lisa Olstein

· Hayden Carruth Award has developed into one of the most prestigious awards for emerging poets · Manuscript enthusiastically selected from over 1200 manuscripts. · Reading 1200 anonymous poetry manuscripts can be a mind-numbing experience, but Olstein’s manuscript shined through at level of reading, and some of the many notes scrawled on her manuscript from the readers include: o YES! o Stunning poems o Generous o Reaches out and grabs the reader o Engaging poetic logic o Lovely arc throughout book · Olstein is a former student at Harvard Divinity School · Subjects of poems include self-hypnosis, Greek islands, perceptions rooted in chronic illness

The Lichtenberg Figures

Ben Lerner

The Lichtenberg Figures , winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning. Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility. Ben Lerner , the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts . He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.