Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin, selected for publication in 2011 by Fanny Howe, recently won the 2009 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize.

Fanny Howe writes:

“These poems are dense and deep. They are necessary, and hot on the eye. I was reminded of Leslie Scalapino, the sensitivity to the surrounding arrangements and to human suffering. There is no distance from Martin’s subject, but immersion and emotional conflict. Discipline is what it took to write such a potent set of poems.”

For more information on Dawn Lundy Martin, an Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program, please visit her faculty biography.

From Discipline:

How do we encounter the many hours past twilight? We understand
that the light is something other, that / it catapults us toward a desire or two if we’re lucky. But, lately, daylight eats itself, and is percussive/ in its chewing, a carnival of curses and thumps. Nothing is wrong. In / the hours after the whinny of the long train passing, we continue to/ think, how special we are, how born and cosmic, how just plain indi-/vidual, but it is not enough. Nothing out there. Everything out there./What does it matter then, if the body climbs into a plastic car, drives/into a deserted driveway and becomes another self? Elsewhere: One/body found. One policeman shot. One 4-year-old girl shot. Teeter,/ tweeter, la, la, la, la, la. I am the I watching the I lift. Roads are short/with darkness. I think, this is what they mean when they say, Savage.