New Jersey (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

Betsy Andrews' sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America - past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs - under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age.