The Secret Language of Women: Poems (Richard Wilbur Award, 5)

The Secret Language of Women by A.M. Juster, recipient of the 2002 Richard Wilbur Award, is a remarkably versatile collection of finely crafted poems and translations. Equually adept at satires, lyrics, epigrams and narratives, Juster meticulously crafts each of his poems so that they resonate uniquely and unexpectedly in his readers' minds. Mona Van Duyn, who chose Juster's sonnet "Moscow Zoo" for the Howard Nemerov Award, remarked how effortlessly "the poem drops without heaviness into its depth," and W.D. Snodgrass described another of Juster's award winning poems as "full of surprises" and "full of invention." In an era of endlessly dull and familiar lyrics, Juster's verse marks itself as strikingly different and permanent, both in its use of form and its subtlely of meaning. As Rhina P. Espaillat has commented on the wide-ranging poems in The Secret Language of Women, "Poems that work this hard in the reader's mind, and do it with such grace and wit that the work is also play, make me grateful that I can read."