Winner 2025:
dawn, the first of the first to sing by David Leftwich
Wide-ranging, playful, astute, and generous, David Leftwich’s at dawn, the first of the first to sing reminds us, through inquiry and sensation, analysis and silence, that “Life is / a door”. At a time when we’re drowning in the “madness of information” and its concomitant pressure to race to assertions, Leftwich resists both the madness and its spurious finish line. Instead, his honed, patient attentiveness and curiosity are trained on both the world and the word, reminding us that unanswerable questions make excellent companions for the long haul. He reminds us that there is durable meaning to be found in asking rather than knowing, in staying suspended, spacious, and fascinated by mysteries, like “the way both birds in flight and poetry, when read aloud, affect the air around us.” –Daniela Naomi Molnar, judge’s citation
Coming out in Fall of 2027.
Winner 2024:
Ritual Loss by Carolann Caviglia Madden
“If all the weavers of the world are sad does it go into the fabric” asks Carolann Madden.
The intense and incantatory voice of Ritual Loss gives us the music of the loom in poems at once feral and magical. These could be the songs of Penelope, of Angela of Foligno, of selkies, of Macbeth’s witches who stir the cauldron, of survivors of trauma.
“My father was / a soldier so what that means is we all went to war”. War, divorce, death, all disorder of loss echoes through this collection. But if “grief is a shark” that swims through Ritual Loss, a generational wisdom stitched with hope casts its oracular shadow over the poems.
Grandmother said: you cannot brace yourself
just fall back and you will be made new
The speaker is scarred, fatalist, but fearless and sensual, prophesying it is not so bad to die if inside us is “pokeweed meadowsweet tangerine”. And in the poem titled “Nipote”, “this is the way / he told me / to dance with dirt / on my face with olives / on my hands.”
Madden’s verse rings with a mystic’s passion and creates its own lexicon of spell casting. “begin / ready heart, begin”. These poems are not afraid to split the lark and explore its bloody chamber. They peer at the animal and exhort it toward transformation—“changeyourlifechangeyourlifechangeyourlife”.
all miracles are terrifying they say our hidden doubts undo us
quickly the moon fills and empties fills and empties
in “quel paese” on this night they say yes yes you can be rid of your curse but once it’s gone what will you bring with you to your new country?
When a sound wave has enough intensity, it becomes luminous. Ritual Loss conjurs a new lyric country that illuminates the heart. “Every time you mend the thing you show it what you think of it”. There’s a poem in the collection called “Contagious Magic” and that’s what these poems are—to be read without stirring, mesmerized. –Desirée Alvarez, judge’s citation
Coming out in Spring of 2027.
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Winner 2023:
YEET! by jason b crawford
There is an intense cosmic energy required to do what jason b crawford’s YEET! does: to give life and love to that impossible, yet constant, toggle between that which cannot be said, and that which cannot be ignored. It tenderly holds the complexity of being Black and queer in the kind of country where skittles can be heartbreaking. It tends marigolds and dahlias, right in the breach. Violence, beauty, smoke. Poetic craft runs deep and deft, exploratory. We ponder what to do with the “dirt-spit bouquet.” The reader is carried – from intimate poems of friendship and love, to the vast horizon – “small petals of lavender cleaning the sky of its grief.” When not carrying the beat of a party, with all its overtones and undertones, the poems pulse with quiet grace and heat. This book is a radiant, intergalactic, hot bloom of a fire – it is so much love. –Sawako Nakayasu, judge’s citation
Published in Fall of 2025.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/Y/bo257334030.html
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Winner 2022:
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber
The speaker of these poems, sometimes with urgent pressured speech, sometimes with a cool remove, wants to tell us something. And we want to listen because what they say is like what we were just thinking. Or maybe like what we once thought. Once felt. Once did. Like that and yet different. This person’s way of being is inimitable. As is ours. Yet their words insist themselves into being something we were about to say. The words came out of their mouth and entered our language-primed minds by way of the eyes which read: ‘Each day / I negotiate another way to live.’ The associative leaps (circumstantially tangential) between being and becoming keep taking us to that place where: ‘The word queer / is barbwire strung across pink sky and snow, / larkspur and lupine rising from pelvis.’ Sometimes poems teach us how to be. Sometimes they simply let us be who we were all along. These poems brilliantly do both. I’m dazzled by the depths they reach. By the brightness of the language. The sharpness of the blade they use to carve a new world from the old. — Mary Jo Bang, judge’s citation
Published in Fall of 2023.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo237307949.html
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Winner 2021:
Chorus by Daniela Naomi Molnar
Chorus is a lyric wail stunned into awakening by crises both planetary and personal– though here, as in the physical universe, the two are not oppositional phenomena. Pieces made of fragmented verse, sinuous prose, and desperate frenzied plea make a rhetoric of salve, or salvation. As the poet writes, ‘The songbird is and is not a metaphor./The songbird is and is not gone.’ What I mean to say to you (I meaning me, you meaning absolutely you, the one reading this) is that this is a book that speaks from a body and to a body. I felt spoken to. Known. ‘Are you there. Is anyone there.’ — Kazim Ali, judge’s citation
Published in January, 2023.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/E/bo196817946.html
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Winner 2020:
Gut by Amanda Larson
Gut is a daring book of poetry that reminds us of Plato’s arguments. Larson follows thought, reason, and logic to show that none of these make sense of assault or abuse: ‘Before those things happened to me, I had been trying to argue my way out.’ And yet, this is not one of the philosopher’s dialogues. This is poetry that takes risks in form and content such that everything about it is unexpected. The plain-spoken nature of Larson’s admissions here are buoyed by her unflinching commitment to craft in sentences, in lines, and in Q&As. But be warned: this is not an easy read. It is, instead, a necessary read. I find much of the work here frightening. And I find that because the truth will scare us. This is a stunning debut. — Jericho Brown, judge’s citation
Published in Fall, 2021.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/G/bo124043072.html
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Winner 2019:
quiet orient riot by Nathalie Khankan
An arresting debut collection, Khankan’s Quiet Orient Riot is like no other book of poems. Truly original in its approach to the poem and to saying anything, it stages a revolution against the spiritual and actual reduction of a people. . . . The poems steadfastly resist metaphor as if to say, nothing can stand in for the thing itself, or as if to say the thing itself stripped of artifice needs no new dressing. Khankan’s is a poetics of powerful imagistic nakedness. Here is where craft and urgency come together to create a voice that is both uncanny and iridescent. Here is where we’re compelled to come together, not in chorus, but in guttural gesture. If we need any book of poems now, it’s Quiet Orient Riot.
–Dawn Lundy Martin, judge’s citation
Published in Fall, 2020.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/Q/bo68377383.html
