Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Forward Prize for Best First Collection: “Wife” by Tiphanie Yanique

By Glynn Young 7 Comments

Woman with rings - Forward Prize for Best First Collection: “Wife” by Tiphanie Yanique

The poetry of Forward Prize winner Tiphanie Yanique may redefine words like “arresting, ” “jarring, ” and “mind-altering.”

Yanique’s Wife won the Forward Prize, given by the Forward Arts Foundation in the United Kingdom, for best first collection. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of poems about becoming a wife, being a wife, thinking and rethinking the meaning of the idea of wife—colored and shaped by a Caribbean context.

We find the drudgery of housework and considerations of cheating on one’s husband. We find the romance of elopement and musings of divorce in a happy marriage. We find musings about one’s own family and experiences in common with all families. And by the end of the collection we understand that all of these seeming contradictions are held together, even if in tension, in every relationship and marriage.

Consider this metaphor for marriage—what happens inside a distressed airplane.

We fall out of the sky

Wife Tiphanie Yanique Forward PrizeBut if we board the plane
I will always fight for us to sit side by side.
If the cabin pressure goes
and the plane plummets like a suicide,
we will learn together what the seat belts are for.
One by one the other passengers will give in
to oxygen, then its absence. But not me,
please know, not me.
I will tie your belt around our waists.
In the coma you cannot help,
I will open your mouth to give you my breath
as the windows burst in.
Perhaps we will never know if
we are dead or alive.

The poem is an unusual description for commitment in a marriage, but the basic elements are there—fighting to stay together, refusing to give up, the giving of breath (and life), the sharing of a seat belt. Those final lines,  “Perhaps we will never know if / we were dead or alive, ” suggest that the knowing may not actually be important. Instead, what’s important is the being together, the shared experience, and the commitment implied. (The phrase that grabbed me by the throat was “the plane plummets like a suicide.”) These ideas set against each other are found consistently throughout the poems.

Forward Prize Tiphanie Yanique Wife

Tiphanie Yanique

Yanique, a professor in the MFA program at New School in New York City, is the author of the novel Land of Love and Drowning (2015); the long poem I Am the Virgin Islands (2012); a collection of short stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (2010); and the short story chapbook The Saving Work (2007). She is also the co-editor of the poetry anthology Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World (2014). She has received the 2011 Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize.

Wife challenges our notions of what marriage (and being a wife) means, but ends up reaffirming the idea of commitment.

The Forward Arts Foundation also gives an annual prize for best single poem. This year, Sasha Dugdale received the 1, 000-pound award (about $1, 300) for “Joy, ” published by PN Review Literary Magazine. Read the poem to see how a poem’s title can both contradict and affirm the poem itself.

Related:

Forward Prize: Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo

Browse more poets and poems

Photo by simplydiandra, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, and Poetry at Work.

__________________________

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • A History of Children’s Stories: “The Haunted Wood” by Sam Leith - May 20, 2025
  • World War II Had Its Poets, Too - May 15, 2025
  • Czeslaw Milosz, 1946-1953: “Poet in the New World” - May 13, 2025

Filed Under: Black Poets, Blog, Books, New York Literary, Poems, poetry, poetry news, poetry reviews, Poets

Try Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. Will Willingham says

    November 22, 2016 at 10:01 am

    Jarring is right. True to form, I read your comments on the poem before reading the poem, and even then, jarring. 🙂 So glad you chose that poem. Thanks for these introductions to the Forward Prize winners, Glynn.

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      November 22, 2016 at 11:01 am

      Thanks for the comment, LW. I read that poem at least five times, and each time I saw it more and more as a very intense love poem.

      Reply
  2. Maureen says

    November 22, 2016 at 11:10 am

    I wonder if the selection of ‘Wife’ as the title’s collection sets readers up for considering the poems from a particular perspective. For example, in ‘We fall out of the sky’, we don’t know the gender of the speaker; it could as easily be a male as a female voice. If we accept it as female voice, then it’s interesting to consider the implicit senses, in the context of “wife”, as female action-taker/doer/protector/saviour – a kind of feminist reading, if you will. And, if we don’t carry implicitly with us the idea of a wife and her roles, the poem, being metaphorical, could be read as about something other than marriage, including, for example, a mother’s love for her child.

    I love that a poem can challenge one’s thinking as this poem does.

    I’ll be putting this collection on my list of reads.

    Reply
    • Maureen says

      November 22, 2016 at 11:10 am

      I meant to write, ‘… as the collection’s title’.

      Reply
  3. Bethany R. says

    November 22, 2016 at 12:05 pm

    “I will tie your belt around our waists.”
    Intentional commitment. Powerful voice.

    Reply
  4. Sandra Heska King says

    November 22, 2016 at 12:50 pm

    “If the cabin pressure goes
    and the plane plummets like a suicide,
    we will learn together what the seat belts are for.”

    This whole poem is a keeper. And I’ve asked for an Amazon gift card for Christmas…

    Reply
  5. Rick Maxson says

    November 26, 2016 at 5:09 am

    Thank you once again, Glynn, for bring a book of poems and your perceptions to our attention. I am certainly ordering this one. Marriage is one of the most challenging (at times) and rewarding (more than challenging) relationships we humans can commit to. Yanique’s poem for me displays the raw emotions of marriage. Its confusions, its clarities, its temptations, the strengths it imparts and the weaknesses it reveals. The final lines, “Perhaps we will never know if we are dead or alive” speaks to me of how marriage can require the abandonment of control—the practice to let it be.

    In our contemporary culture we have so often lost sight of the seriousness of becoming married. It is a sacrament (And what meaning does that word carry in today’s world?), not to be taken lightly for what it can give and what it requires for what it can give.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy