Eryn Green’s Eruv is the latest winner of the oldest annual literary award in the United States, which originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty. Green joins an esteemed roster of past winners that includes Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Hass, and as Carl Phillips, competition judge and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, points out, this collection “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented.”

Taking its title from the Hebrew word for a ritual enclosure that opens from private into public spaces, Eruv includes poems of love, sadness, and pathos while celebrating the power of ritual and untamed landscapes. Just as a larger home can be fashioned out of communally shared alleyways and courtyards, with passages enabling movement from one world to another, Green’s poems provide a similar doorway into a deeper understanding of ourselves.