Foiled Again

The seventh winner of the annual <I>New Criterion</I> Poetry Prize is J. Allyn Rosser's <I>Foiled Again</I>. Ms. Rosser's third poetry collection contains poems of startling range and depth. At the heart of the work is a kind of crazed optimism-a quixotic wryly cheerful pilgrimage through the maze of bafflement loneliness and love that constitutes our experience. Her poems pursue the transcendent certitudes we crave and invites us to embrace the present as a revelation we forgot to have. <I>The New Criterion</I> one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry established an annual poetry prize in 2000 and Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual <I>New Criterion</I> poetry prize-winner in 2001.