My Shining Archipelago

Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition

Talvikki Ansel’s My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, “Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism—more, always more, in the Amazon basin.” This cycle of “freewheeling sonnets” (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in t...