Ander Monson

Other Electricities, Ander Monson’s 2005 debut collection, introduced one of the freshest and most interesting new voices in years. The interrelated stories, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the bleakest midwinter, represent a sort of inventory of loss, complete with obituaries, obsessive weather minutiae, electrical charts, and an elegiac style that drifts again and again into stretches of purely poetic language. Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, winner of Graywolf’s 2006 nonfiction prize, finds Monson ruminating on such topics as disc golf, car washes, and the history of mining in Northern Michigan. Robert Polito, who selected the book for the prize, says of the author, “For Monson the essay is something like a schematics for our fiercest longings and most ecstatic inventions.”