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The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry

Finalist: Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, by Will Alexander (New Directions)

Surreal and searing poems, anchored by cultural and literary figures of the African continent, that couple breathtaking musicality with carefully considered global history.

Nominated Work

Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten

By

Will Alexander

 

“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.

Biography

Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world, where each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all fields of experience are open for exploration: art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics. Alexander’s books include Asia and Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity, Sunrise In Armageddon, Diary As Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. He lives in The City of Angels.

Winners

Prize Winner in Poetry in 2022:

Diane Seuss

A virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt. Poetry

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2022:

Mai Der Vang

Documentary poems examining the biological warfare that threads through the wars of the Hmong, acknowledging those who perished and the trauma of those who survived in lyrics of witness that defy erasure.

The Jury

David Baker(Chair)

Poetry Editor, The Kenyon Review; Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing, Denison University

Anne Boyer*

Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Kansas City Art Institute

Tyehimba Jess*

Professor of English, College of Staten Island

Prageeta Sharma

Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, Pomona College

Mary Szybist

Morgan Odell Professor of Humanities, Lewis & Clark College

Winners in Poetry

2021

Natalie Diaz

A collection of tender, heart-wrenching and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict.
2020

Jericho Brown

A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.
2019

Forrest Gander

A collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.

2018

Frank Bidart

A volume of unyielding ambition and remarkable scope that mixes long dramatic poems with short elliptical lyrics, building on classical mythology and reinventing forms of desires that defy societal norms.
See All Poetry

2022 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic

For an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author's personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.
See All 2022 Winners