The Lamp with Wings

Book excerpt: A winner of the 2010 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Ilya Kaminsky (author of Dancing in Odessa, recipient of the 2004 Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, among other honors, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry), Vizsolyi’s work perpetuates NPS’s tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from emerging poets. Kaminksy writes that Vizsolyi’s poetry “is erotic the way Catullus was erotic, and Mayakovsky. The voice is arrogant and tender, it goes ‘on the nerve,’ as Frank O’Hara told us the poet must. This book with knock your socks off. This is real poetry.” For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.