Dante Micheaux Wins Four Quartets Prize
The T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America have announced that Dante Micheaux is the winner of the second annual Four Quartets Prize, which comes with a $20,000, for his book Circus (Indolent Books). Micheaux was selected by judges Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Rosanna Warren.
The Judges’ citation: “How right that this poet’s first name should be Dante. For his Circus is a Comedy: a savage comedy, lacerating dialects, fingering wounds, looking for loves right and wrong in the crevices of history and of humiliated bodes. And yet, and yet. His language exults, triumphs, and freely rummages in the treasuries of the Bible, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, Baraka, and Mahalia Jackson, taking what it needs, making it his sovereign own, a wrested blessing."
