Poetry. In this collection, selected by Joseph Millar as the winner of the Three Candles First Book Prize, Tony Trigilio deftly weaves cultural references as varied as Hawaii Five-O and Lee Harvey Oswald into a stunning collection that forces us to re-evaluate our own lives. Whether he's describing a ballgame on the radio or an auto-responder from the White House, we know we are in capable hands. "In THE LAMA'S ENGLISH LESSONS, Trigilio navigates a postmodern American urbanscape searching for grace. He calmly chronicles the way the natural and the mechanical now interpenetrate, taking on each other's characteristics, missions: 'The cabs stupefied / at the airport like cattle.' In his quest he encounters the homeless, baseball, TV, special prosecutors, jazz, Lee Harvey Oswald, the proclamations of newscasters and ex-presidents, and the legacies of WWII and Vietnam. He discovers odd moments of humor and transcendence in the mass transit, multi tasking madness we're trapped, in a confluence of personal and public histories, and manages to float above it all, maintaining perfect spiritual equilibrium, like strains of Buddhist music"—Amy Gerstler.