Bøker i Miller Williams Poetry Prize-serien

Haunted as much by place and people, landscapes and distant figures, as by the possibilities of image-making itself, Eternal Sentences is a song for the hidden depots of rural America.

"'When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,' writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss"--Provided by publishe

"In 'The Trouble with Light,' Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. Largely set in the poet's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Clark's portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection"

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati's Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet's uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, "You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what's missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong." Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

"Finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams poetry prize selected by Patricia Smith"--Cover.