Pulitzer Prize Poetry Winner

Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016

by Frank Bidart

Summary

This career-spanning volume gathers Bidart's voice-driven poems on desire, guilt, art, and the violence of inner life. He uses unusual capitalization and typography to score speech on the page, so that thinking itself acquires a dramatic shape. Together the poems trace a long investigation into how the self is constructed through obsession, confession, and inheritance.

Historical Context & Significance

Bidart uses unique punctuation to mimic the actual sound of a person thinking or speaking.