The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized author of numerous collections of poetry and a former professor at the University of Utah. Things That Burn by Jacqueline Berger is the 2004 prizewinning volume selected by this year’s judge, former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand. In this evocative collection Berger dissects in ardent language and rich imagery the ways that hunger and longing propel us through our lives, offering the reader a postmortem of passion and desire.

Jacqueline Berger is the author of The Mythologies of Danger, winner of both the 1997 Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. She teaches writing at Notre Dame de Namur University and at City College of San Francisco. She lives with her husband in San Francisco.