Blue Colonial: A collection of poems on the cultural interaction between the colonists and the Wampanoag tribe in the early seventeenth-century

Blue Colonial (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) is the winner of the ninth annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, a competition judged this year by Robert Pinsky. In this collection, David Roderick re-imagines the past in order to explore the burdens of our historical inheritance: vanished Native American tribes, the seeds of American culture, and our physical and psychological encroachment on the natural landscape. Whether he is writing about historical legacy or his own back yard, Roderick has arrived at a voice of distinct solitariness and precise observation.