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For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Seven thousand five hundred dollars ($7,500).

Practical Gods, by Carl Dennis (Penguin Books)

George Rupp and Carl Dennis

Columbia University President George Rupp (left) presents Carl Dennis with the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Winning Work

Practical Gods

Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times). Many of the poems in this, his eighth collection, involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. 

While making no claims to stable conclusions, these lucid, probing, agile poems help us name the everyday, available gods that are easy to ignore, both those that frustrate and those that sustain life and make it rewarding.

(From the book jacket)

Biography

Carl Dennis is the author of seven other books of poetry, including most recently, Ranking the Wishes. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Assocation for his contribution to American poetry.

He teaches in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2002:

The Jury

Wendy Lesser(chair )

editor

Wesley McNair

poet

Winners in Poetry

2002 Prize Winners

Staff

For its comprehensive and insightful coverage, executed under the most difficult circumstances, of the terrorist attack on New York City, which recounted the day's events and their implications for the future.