Lost Horse Press, a nonprofit independent press based in Sandpoint, Idaho that publishes works of established as well as emerging poets, announced this week that judge Piotr Florczyk has selected Jason Gray’s Radiation King as the winner of the 2018 Idaho Prize for Poetry.

Radiation King, the second full-length collection by the poet Jason Gray who is also a former Associate Editor for AWP, explores “the beginning and the possible futures of the atomic world we created at the start of the 20^th century,” according to the press release about the Idaho Prize.

Final judge Piotr Florczyk had this to say about the collection: “Apocalyptic, cautionary, but ultimately redemptive, Jason Gray’s poems force us to face up to years of natural and human degradation committed in the name of progress… Indeed, these taut poems praise the concreteness of the world—its physics and our physicality—with intelligence and music that are hard to find these days, when so much of contemporary verse seems beholden to overwrought conceptual designs or ready-made narratives. If you wonder what happened to the unassuming voice of the poet full of awe and doubt, or yearn for poems resembling, to paraphrase another poet, matches lit in the dark, then Radiation King should be at the top of your reading list.”

Gray’s previous collection, Photographing Eden, was selected as the winner of the 2008 Hollis Summers Prize and was published by Ohio University Press. He is also the author of two chapbooks How to Paint the Savior Dead (Kent State UP, 2007) and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo (Dream Horse Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, Poetry Ireland Review, and many other places.

Established in 2004, the Idaho Prize for Poetry is an annual competition offering publication and an honorarium to a book-length work. Previous winners include Essy Stone, Yahya Frederickson, Melissa Kwasny and Alvin Greenberg.

Photo Credit: Cynthia Marie Hoffman