Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin.
From Seven Chimeras

The way Booth makes a love story:
same as a regular story, except
under one rock is a trapdoor that leads
to a room full of belly buttons;
each must be pushed, one is a landmine.

The way Booth makes hope:
thirty-seven acres, Black Damon,
Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire
in the Great Field and let it become
unquenchable.

The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade:
shoot the weasel in the neck
and toss it to the buzzards.

The way Booth thinks of salvation:
God holding a broken abacus,
colored beads falling away.