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Yale Series of Younger Poets
It Is Daylight
Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize
Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”
Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”
- GenresPoetryFictionLiterature
112 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
December 3, 2015
...cemeteries/Of grandparents and criminals
God's going to a dinner
where they're having lamb chops
and veal stuffing...
And after, they're going to have
pear clafoutis behind a velvet curtain
and drive their skulls into the centre of a diamond
“The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure.”
-Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony
God's going to a dinner
where they're having lamb chops
and veal stuffing...
And after, they're going to have
pear clafoutis behind a velvet curtain
and drive their skulls into the centre of a diamond
“The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure.”
-Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony
April 16, 2021
Wonderful, bleak, hilarious.
These are wonderful poems. With a terrific introduction by a favorite poet of mine, Louise Gluck.
I'm not good at writing about poetry. These are almost surreal, with images juxtaposed and a voice that to me sounds almost deadpan. They would be unbearably sad if they weren't also (to me) funny.
These are wonderful poems. With a terrific introduction by a favorite poet of mine, Louise Gluck.
I'm not good at writing about poetry. These are almost surreal, with images juxtaposed and a voice that to me sounds almost deadpan. They would be unbearably sad if they weren't also (to me) funny.
November 16, 2017
Still one of my favorite books of poetry. Arda Collins achieves something here that very few poets can; she enters into a state of blank gnosis. This is past present and future put in one tense. I liked all of the poems, especially "Heaven". Certainly deserved the Yale Younger Poets award. Reading it takes bravery, I suppose.
A must read for poets who get tired of confessional poetry.
A must read for poets who get tired of confessional poetry.
July 10, 2009
"It was finished and went to heaven.
Heaven is a white formica table.
Not what I expected,
but I'm not unsatisfied.
God still isn't here.
I'm not even waiting."
-From "Heaven"
OH MY GOD ARDA COLLINS I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.
Heaven is a white formica table.
Not what I expected,
but I'm not unsatisfied.
God still isn't here.
I'm not even waiting."
-From "Heaven"
OH MY GOD ARDA COLLINS I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.
July 22, 2012
Some of these are only 3-star poems, but the 5-star moments are such beautiful, elegant, sober & strange 5-star moments, that I'll eagerly bias my memory.
August 31, 2019
Dissociated sterilised surrealist emotional philosophical inquiries into stuff I think about a lot. Sometimes a more literal register sneaks in in a way that didn't feel interestingly related to the usual. There's evolution with development, but it felt more like a collection, with the material more compelling than the trace thereof, but it's brilliant, so that's hardly a slight. I'm guessing the preponderance of bad reviews in contrast to the rating is on account of there being so much to write about it unless you've endeavoured to hate it. The foreword is good, even if it only brushes the surface.
(Don't get the Kindle edition if you like to take notes as it's one of those with images of text)
(Don't get the Kindle edition if you like to take notes as it's one of those with images of text)
March 20, 2025
My favorite poetry collection I’ve read in a while
October 27, 2014
For many years, graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Poetry Workshop were under the Jorie Graham spell – we got lots and lots of numbered sequential poems with blank gasps punctuating philosophical/historical subjects intersecting with mundane events in the poet’s life. Well, she’s moved on to Harvard so that was that. Reading Arda Collins’ collection, I kept thinking, “ah, now we start getting poets under the Mark Levine spell!”
In her introduction to this Yale Younger Poets prize-winning book, Louise Glück compares the poems to Skinner boxes at one point, which seems very apt – these are poems that seem like controlled environments for observing the behavior of subjects put under considerably stressful and unnatural experiments. Like Levine, they have an American surrealism 3.0 quality to them: two-parts Tomaž Šalamun to one-part Talking Heads to final-part David Lynch. In fact, Lynch’s classic “Rabbits” kept playing in my head with practically each poem I read by Collins – there is the same foreboding quality of immanent danger that never actually occurs coupled with creepy canned laughter that seems totally misplaced:
Nothing happens and yet everything gets darker and changes. So too as you turn each page of this collection. It seems timely but the collection as a whole suffers from too little reprieve of music (and here I wish she were a closer Levine acolyte!) – Collins writes in very static sentences and even static words (more than once we actually get “blah blah blah” as filler!) I think Collins might have an interesting take on a novel in her, but I’m not going to rush out to read any more of her poetry.
One last comment on this book – it seems that the poet and her publisher have agreed to change fonts throughout the book in order to get the book under a certain number of pages that must have been in the rules of the contest she won. Well, it makes for an ugly book and distracts from its overall quality in an almost imperceptible but inescapable way – she should have just edited a few of the hashtag/numbered poems out (we get four differently numbered “Pool” poems, one numbered all the way up to #13 – thankfully we were spared the other nine, I guess! Similar for poems titled “Letter Poem.”) Or ditched the prose piece "Parts of an Argument" which seem part of another project altogether.
In her introduction to this Yale Younger Poets prize-winning book, Louise Glück compares the poems to Skinner boxes at one point, which seems very apt – these are poems that seem like controlled environments for observing the behavior of subjects put under considerably stressful and unnatural experiments. Like Levine, they have an American surrealism 3.0 quality to them: two-parts Tomaž Šalamun to one-part Talking Heads to final-part David Lynch. In fact, Lynch’s classic “Rabbits” kept playing in my head with practically each poem I read by Collins – there is the same foreboding quality of immanent danger that never actually occurs coupled with creepy canned laughter that seems totally misplaced:
“Department Store”
You’re a realist. It’s a department store.
God is never there,
even when everyone goes home at night.
A saleswoman left her dark gray wool skirt
laid out on a chair when she went to bed.
The room was quiet while the woman slept.
The skirt didn’t pray.
The skirt was lined with shadows from the blinds.
The lines moved around the room through the night.
The saleswoman breathed into the shadows.
Her breath, the heat, the faint smell of supper
she had made earlier passed through the skirt.
It was a long time since any speaking
but it was as though there had been speaking.
Night was long and day began forever.
The skirt was different than the night before.
Nothing happens and yet everything gets darker and changes. So too as you turn each page of this collection. It seems timely but the collection as a whole suffers from too little reprieve of music (and here I wish she were a closer Levine acolyte!) – Collins writes in very static sentences and even static words (more than once we actually get “blah blah blah” as filler!) I think Collins might have an interesting take on a novel in her, but I’m not going to rush out to read any more of her poetry.
One last comment on this book – it seems that the poet and her publisher have agreed to change fonts throughout the book in order to get the book under a certain number of pages that must have been in the rules of the contest she won. Well, it makes for an ugly book and distracts from its overall quality in an almost imperceptible but inescapable way – she should have just edited a few of the hashtag/numbered poems out (we get four differently numbered “Pool” poems, one numbered all the way up to #13 – thankfully we were spared the other nine, I guess! Similar for poems titled “Letter Poem.”) Or ditched the prose piece "Parts of an Argument" which seem part of another project altogether.
October 29, 2017
93pp. A disorienting and interesting book of poetry that plays with time, perception, and ordinariness. Reading it felt like looking at an M.C. Escher except it all took place in completely unexceptional locations--ordinary streets, apartments, etc. I think it was challenging language as meaning. It was more difficult and strange than most of the poetry I enjoy, but by the end I was really interested in how she was using words to explore the idea of non-linear time and extant possibility. A lot of it also felt bleak and disconnected/numb, which I didn't love. Here's my favorite one (the mildest, most sensical poem in this collection) :
Low
It's not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery
It's a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by pines.
There's a couple.
It's a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is walnut. They used to lie down on the carpet.
between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests left.
The cups and saucers were still.
Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other's face as a backdrop and sometimes
the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there was an ending in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,
in which they are walking.
It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a brown rooftop early in March. The ground hadn't softened.
One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The reflections in the windows
made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and branches--and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to walk under branches.
(The lines are longer on the page and break in different places.)
Low
It's not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery
It's a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by pines.
There's a couple.
It's a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is walnut. They used to lie down on the carpet.
between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests left.
The cups and saucers were still.
Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other's face as a backdrop and sometimes
the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there was an ending in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,
in which they are walking.
It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a brown rooftop early in March. The ground hadn't softened.
One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The reflections in the windows
made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and branches--and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to walk under branches.
(The lines are longer on the page and break in different places.)
July 30, 2020
This book is so perfect for this moment - it is very interested in the inside of a home, a small town, a self. It asks a lot of questions we can’t answer and attempts to answer them. It’s also very funny, in a peculiar kind of way, and the same voice echoes all the way through so you feel a cohesion that is comforting and startling, all at once.
July 3, 2010
I hated this book. Maybe I'm not "mature" enough to understand these sad suburban squanderings, and that's exactly why I hate it.
July 5, 2010
I don't really know how to review this book.
It really just didn't connect with me at all. And so, typically, I would give it a lower score.
At the same time, I was so intrigued by the voice. At times "confessional," it also maintains a certain clinical distance. I haven't read any voice quite like it - and that elevates it an extra star for me.
The voice almost reminds me of a documentarian following a serial killer. As odd as that might sound, I pictured that at several points in the book. The odd combination of closeness and distance, almost a sort of poetic stalking...
Very interesting.
It really just didn't connect with me at all. And so, typically, I would give it a lower score.
At the same time, I was so intrigued by the voice. At times "confessional," it also maintains a certain clinical distance. I haven't read any voice quite like it - and that elevates it an extra star for me.
The voice almost reminds me of a documentarian following a serial killer. As odd as that might sound, I pictured that at several points in the book. The odd combination of closeness and distance, almost a sort of poetic stalking...
Very interesting.
August 10, 2011
This book is about nothing, but I mean that as a good thing. There is an emptiness that echos throughout the book. The poem Department Store is a good example of this emptiness that Arda Collins makes palpable. The speaker is detatched from their surroundings, moving through the world almost like a sleepwalker. These poems are interested in what goes on in an empty room when the door is closed. "He wondered what became of all the things/ that never happened..."-12. Each poem is quiet and passes like a cloud. The everyday-tone becomes a little wearisome and does not always mesh well with abstraction.
July 15, 2009
I heard Arda Collins read in Chicago at one of the off-site AWP readings (I'm pretty sure it was the jubilat reading). I left the conference in February with her name on my must-find-and-read list. The short and sweet: It Is Daylight is good. Some of the poems do nothing for me ("Garden Apartments," "Poem #9") and others, especially the first one in the book ("The News") drive me batty with envy of her talent. I look forward to reading her future publications.
July 2, 2009
This is one cohesive little book--like the Abbey Road of slim, lonely volumes of poetry. She's fresh, and funny as hell too. Well played.
Poems that made me go "gah" (many) included: The News, With a Voice in Front of You, Spring, A History of Something, Because It Has to Be This Way, Garden Apartments, January, Central Park South, Elegy, Snow on the Apples, and the killer prose poem, Parts of an Argument.
Poems that made me go "gah" (many) included: The News, With a Voice in Front of You, Spring, A History of Something, Because It Has to Be This Way, Garden Apartments, January, Central Park South, Elegy, Snow on the Apples, and the killer prose poem, Parts of an Argument.
December 1, 2011
I will defer to William Logan's pretty much dead-on review of this book. Click the link below to read it (last of the five):
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles....
Basically, the book is awesome but too long. It's worth it to read it just for the first 1/3, then it peters out. Still, I'm really looking forward to what this poet does in the future.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles....
Basically, the book is awesome but too long. It's worth it to read it just for the first 1/3, then it peters out. Still, I'm really looking forward to what this poet does in the future.
December 31, 2020
The poems in this collection are quirky and interesting. She has a way of being moved by unlikely things- like the smell of a neighborhood. I really liked “Garden Apartments.” She created an uneasy sense of a place, a small part of a neighborhood, and I completely understood what she meant.
April 9, 2009
I am rather in love with this book and its flatness and its food and its interrogations and its hiding-in-apartments right now.
January 30, 2018
Night halos
any time of day. If you take away all the light
there's a nebula in your face.
any time of day. If you take away all the light
there's a nebula in your face.
January 12, 2023
An air of anxiety and dread is established in the first poem and returns regularly, along with scenes of connection, disconnection, and alienation. The topics are mundane, suburban things like ice cream trucks and duvets, so they can occasionally be comic too. A couple poems touch on Collins's rural upbringing and the trauma of her family in the Armenian genocide, and some poems are truly abstract.
The routine syntax is easy to read, although it wraps some interesting word juxtapositions and its word choices are sometimes simplified to the point of apparent naïveté. The balance of casual surrealism is incredibly delicate, and can lose coherence in a long poem such as Central Park South. And while I appreciate the supple imagery, I sometimes feel that it's blocking the way to a deeper understanding of feelings.
The routine syntax is easy to read, although it wraps some interesting word juxtapositions and its word choices are sometimes simplified to the point of apparent naïveté. The balance of casual surrealism is incredibly delicate, and can lose coherence in a long poem such as Central Park South. And while I appreciate the supple imagery, I sometimes feel that it's blocking the way to a deeper understanding of feelings.
March 3, 2018
Reminded me of my own poetry style, observing the everyday things and becoming lost in thought. Some of the poems were incredibly insightful, but I feel like only the poet herself can understand the majority of her works. All in all, this is a decent anthology, but I don't think it quite meets up with the hype.
July 20, 2020
You are watching your life on an old tube television. God is on the couch with you. You've been drinking and are worried God will judge. Your not sure if the TV is on or you are just imagining the TV is playing your life. Every character addresses you directly anyway. God says he has to go, he has things to do, which is fine, since he is so hard to write dialogue for.
October 27, 2024
I don't usually write reviews for poetry on here like a do for novels because that feels like just not the vibe BUT It Is Daylight is a spectacular book with an admirable commitment to honest observation and reporting without moral judgement.
June 12, 2020
Really weird and interesting. Kind of feels like reading about being bored, but it's not all that boring.
July 22, 2022
"The News" / "Not For Chopin" / "From Speaking In The Fall" / "Heaven" / "Neptune" / "Poem" / "Snow On The Apples"
May 7, 2010
Is it Day or is it Night?
I read it thinking the title "It is Daylight" was a bit interesting with the cover being the opposite of what the title sounded as though it was supposed to be like. I thought it would be poetry dealing with non-darkish sides of poetry... I was a bit wrong. I first discovered this story in a class that I’m taking of Post World War II literature. I saw this title and thought about it to be about a book of somewhat positive poems, It is Daylight by Arda Collins seems as though it was a normal, not so depressing and a bit upbeat kind of poetry. Although it was extremely different from what I was expecting, I actually grew to like it over the course of time.
What made me interested in Arda Collin’s poetry was the fact that she’s a bit “off the wall”. Her first poem of the book “Spring” was actually the first poem that made me realize that her poetry was a bit different to begin with.
What made me like this poem was how different it was.
I was making a road
The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room
Through the yellow curtains and into the sunlight
Bread warmed in the over
And in my oven mitt, I managed to forget
That I’d ever punched someone in the face.
Even the first few lines made me see that she’s one of those poets that writes what’s on her mind. I thought this poem would be something to deal with Spring but it turns out to be about her being hungry, being distracted by her random thoughts, burning the roast that she was making and then going to get food from the grocery store.
My favorite lines even in the poem was
I could get in the car right now
And drive all night,
As soon as I had a sandwich.
Swiss, lettuce. It was exciting.
I just find that her language in her writing is just interesting and completely different from what I am used to.
Another poem that I thought was very interesting and one of those poems that you have to read more than once was “With A Voice In Front Of You”. The beginning of the poem was
As you’re standing with the heel of your shoe
On top of some neatly sliced red onion
You might think to yourself, “I’m at onion,” or “I’m in onion today.”
I could not help but smile a bit at the very thought of even the first few lines of randomness that I had just read. She just seems so interesting and so smart. Her poetry is a bit random and a bit “off the wall” but I have to say that reading these poems brings me to a bit of an understanding of what she is like.
I believe that her other poems are also very different in the book. Arda Collins, to me, is a very... different... poet. Her randomness is just hilarious to me and to me she's a poet I would like to read more from in the near future. Bold, hilarious, and intriguing.
I read it thinking the title "It is Daylight" was a bit interesting with the cover being the opposite of what the title sounded as though it was supposed to be like. I thought it would be poetry dealing with non-darkish sides of poetry... I was a bit wrong. I first discovered this story in a class that I’m taking of Post World War II literature. I saw this title and thought about it to be about a book of somewhat positive poems, It is Daylight by Arda Collins seems as though it was a normal, not so depressing and a bit upbeat kind of poetry. Although it was extremely different from what I was expecting, I actually grew to like it over the course of time.
What made me interested in Arda Collin’s poetry was the fact that she’s a bit “off the wall”. Her first poem of the book “Spring” was actually the first poem that made me realize that her poetry was a bit different to begin with.
What made me like this poem was how different it was.
I was making a road
The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room
Through the yellow curtains and into the sunlight
Bread warmed in the over
And in my oven mitt, I managed to forget
That I’d ever punched someone in the face.
Even the first few lines made me see that she’s one of those poets that writes what’s on her mind. I thought this poem would be something to deal with Spring but it turns out to be about her being hungry, being distracted by her random thoughts, burning the roast that she was making and then going to get food from the grocery store.
My favorite lines even in the poem was
I could get in the car right now
And drive all night,
As soon as I had a sandwich.
Swiss, lettuce. It was exciting.
I just find that her language in her writing is just interesting and completely different from what I am used to.
Another poem that I thought was very interesting and one of those poems that you have to read more than once was “With A Voice In Front Of You”. The beginning of the poem was
As you’re standing with the heel of your shoe
On top of some neatly sliced red onion
You might think to yourself, “I’m at onion,” or “I’m in onion today.”
I could not help but smile a bit at the very thought of even the first few lines of randomness that I had just read. She just seems so interesting and so smart. Her poetry is a bit random and a bit “off the wall” but I have to say that reading these poems brings me to a bit of an understanding of what she is like.
I believe that her other poems are also very different in the book. Arda Collins, to me, is a very... different... poet. Her randomness is just hilarious to me and to me she's a poet I would like to read more from in the near future. Bold, hilarious, and intriguing.
July 28, 2024
The poems in this collection are interesting, but they seem headed to a place than none of them quite reach. They spend all their time asea, and never think about the shore, so they remain ungrounded. I'm all about the voyage, but with no hint of a destination, even one that the poet never intended to actually reach, I found it hard to relate or connect to the poems.
December 18, 2012
*Kind of* a slog... It has it's pay-offs, but they just weren't quite often enough for my taste. I don't know, the mood really often felt slouchy, and when they woke up, so to speak, the fancifulness of them seemed forced and overly ironic. Anyway, no doubt a talented lady here, maybe just not my thing? I might like a few more gut punches than Collins appears to have in her....
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June 9, 2010I've had this on my "currently reading" shelf for maybe nine months. I've been lying to you. In truth, I read about three quarters of this volume and just couldn't get excited about it. I may try again in the future. For now, though, it's going on a different shelf.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews