This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin.
 From Seven Chimeras

The way Booth makes a love story:
same as a regular story, except
under one rock is a trapdoor that leads
to a room full of belly buttons;
each must be pushed, one is a landmine.

The way Booth makes hope:
thirty-seven acres, Black Damon,
Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire
in the Great Field and let it become
unquenchable.

The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade:
shoot the weasel in the neck
and toss it to the buzzards.

The way Booth thinks of salvation:
God holding a broken abacus,
colored beads falling away.