Bøger i Iowa Poetry Prize serien

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney's In Kind is focused 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. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclam

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.