Photo credit: Ellen Galvin

Habitat offers an opportunity to trace a remarkable poetic career. In their richly various shapes, colors, textures, and strategies, Galvin’s poems bear witness to matters both joyful and intractable.

Brendan Galvin is the author of thirteen previous poetry books, including Place Keepers (2003) and The Strength of a Named Thing (1999). His work has also appeared in over 400 journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, New Republic and Atlantic Monthly. Among his many honors are the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr., Poetry Prize, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation, and the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation.

Judges' Citation

Over the past four decades, in an era deeply suspicious of the relationship between language and external reality, Brendan Galvin has been quietly reminding us that the best poetry can deepen our understanding of the natural world and of each other. “You are tired of living when you’re tired of us,” he imagines a field of potatoes saying in one poem. And, indeed, if the earthy and local poems of this volume could speak in one voice, they would be making the same claim to past and future readers.