Bøger i Iowa Poetry Prize serien

"Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman-tender, hungry, hopeful-who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack-poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book's early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity, the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her. As the speaker comes of age, the collection asks a set of interrelated questions: What kind of life can a subject build when her early experiences give rise to dissociation? What kinds of stories can we tell when trauma robs us of memory and language? What paths might lead toward liberation from the foundational constraints of heteronormativity, capitalism, and violence? And how can such liberation be managed or maintained against the backdrop of political upheaval, climate catastrophe, and pandemic? To these questions, the book attempts a set of answers, all of which involve love and desire as compensatory forces. While their speaker often finds herself in mourning, afraid, and unsure of who and how to trust, the poems in Lo seek modes of survival and even joy, a way to tell the truth about suffering (her own and other's) while claiming the solace and delight available in friendship, sex, marriage, and the natural world"--

"Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney's In Kind is focused, finally, on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. In Kind works in conversation and collaboration with the myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where women are often transformed into the non-human after a traumatic encounter. In these poems, women turn into animals, plants, geological formations, ghosts, and other natural phenomena. They flex their new figures and speak. Their stories beg what forms can fit the human survivor dehumanized by violence. The poems in In Kind adopt the survival strategies found in myth, in magic, in the supernatural realm; the natural world, the animal world, and the world of plants; and the material world available. In Kind functions as both mask and mirror, a series of forms (poetic, human, non-human) ask the reader to look into and through the traumatized body. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation"--

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members' mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected.

This collection holds a mirror to the self and in its reflection we find the elegiac and the ecological, as in 'how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?', the worlds both domestic and natural, as in 'when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame', a daughter 'shattered, but not without humor'.

Explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging.

In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms.

Offers a perceptive, tenacious investigation of gender, authority, and art. Jennifer Habel draws a contrast between the archetype of the lone male genius and the circumscribed, relational lives of women.

With calm abandon, Rob Schlegel stands among the genderless trees to shake notions of masculinity and fatherhood. Schlegel incorporates the visionary into everyday life, inhabiting patterns of relation that do not rely on easy categories.

At the edge of a field a thought waits"", writes Cassie Donish, in her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital, on a shoreline. These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode.

Proceeding from Helene Cixous's charge to ""kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing"", The Fix forges that woman's reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire-often to darkly comedic effect.

Alicia Mountain's urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow.

Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia - in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure.