Finalists for the 1992-1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : POETRY

AFTERWORLD by Christine Garren (University of Chicago Press). Lyrical, urgent evocations of unseen mysteries beyond life’s frail and doomed reality insist on the immediacy of listening, connecting: “This is where we stopped, in the metallic garden/ by the shoelace ferns./You were laughing so fully I think you drank the music of a silver tuning fork/to make you that beautiful/ . . . this is the only honest picture of how we existed/loving so thoroughly, living so closely against the other/we were almost erased.”

The Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists and winners are selected in each category by an independent panel of judges. Winners will be announced in the Book Review issue of October 31.