It Is Daylight

Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.” Arda Collins lives in Denver, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry. Her poems have been published in journals and magazines including The New Yorker , The American Poetry Review , A Public Space , and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow. CONTENTS 5 Foreword 7 Acknowledgments 17 The News 19 Spring 20 Pool #3 22 With A Voice In Front Of You 23 The Sound Of Peeling A Potato 25 Low 26 Department Store 27 A History Of Something 28 Letter Poem #5 30 25A 32 Letter Poem #6 34 Island 35 Not For Chopin 38 From Speaking In The Fall 40 Because It Has To Be This Way 42 Pool #13 45 Pool #10 46 It Is Daylight 47 Garden Apartments 50 April 52 Pool #8 54 January 55 Over No Hills 58 Poem #9 60 Heaven 62 West 64 Central Park South 66 Bed Poem 72 Elegy 74 Arctic Poem 77 Pennsylvania 79 Evening 84 Dawn 85 Parts Of An Argument 98 Neptune 101 Poem 105 The Sky As With Bells, As With Nothing In It 107 Snow On The Apples 108 A collection of poems of Arda Collins who is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.