Foiled Again: Poems

The seventh winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is J. Allyn Rosser's Foiled Again. Ms. Rosser's third poetry collection contains poems of startling range and depth, with formal poems-traditional, hybrid, and nonce-and just as many shaped by the loopy trajectory of their associative momentum. At the heart of Rosser's work is a kind of crazed optimism-a quixotic, wryly cheerful pilgrimage through the maze of bafflement, loneliness, and love that constitutes our experience.