The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. Dear Blackbird, is the 2006 prize-winning volume selected by this year's judge, J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review.
"Most new poetry I read nowadays seems decorous in its austerities or its embellishments: willed, over-plotted, dry. Not Jane Springer’s. Her work leaps to its tasks with a heady extravagance. Dear Blackbird, is her letter to the world, as eerie as Dickinson’s. Its pages don’t depend on a sequence of neat stanzas but are a surge of incantatory phrases and feelings. The skin of each poem quivers with the mind’s contradictions, the heart’s panic. It is risky, not merely reckless; rapturous, not merely rapacious. Memories spill over fantasies, Southern lore collides with hipster know-how. This book is the most exciting debut in years, and when we remember that 'début' originally meant to score first in a new game, that is just what Springer has done: taken on a new set of terms and struck first, struck gold." —J. D. McClatchy
