Frank Bidart’s collection of poems from 1965 to 2016, published in 2017 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The collection was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award in 2017. Bidart also won the highly coveted Literary Awards Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2018. He is considered as one of the most influential original voices of modern poetry.
The collection accomplishes an impressive feat with the immersion of language in the mechanics of the body and mind. Bidart has strange obsession with the diverse registers the human voice can utter. He also explores outcasts of the society, those often misunderstood by the system.
Bidart’s work always takes the radical side of things while dissecting human nature. He continuously battles with his inner self in an attempt to strike a balance that is unwilling to take form. Empathy is forced to the reader as the poet attempts to relate to the unknown. Thus, giving a voice to the obscure.
