Bøger i Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry serien

This poetry debut details the death of the speaker's father after brain surgery, confronting personal and political grief.

Hernandez' third collection is blunt and undeceived. His odes to mortality are laced with wit and sadness rising like helium.

Composed entirely of words taken from the letters and public statements of the notorious segregationist Bull Connor, the poems in White Bull use language that was wielded in violence and oppression to reckon with the present moment. The city of Birmingham is a character too, with its suffocating heat and humidity, quarry pools, and mountain in the distance. Here, the truth comes out, like a child whispering in the midst of a political rally, ¿Summer separates us with the same trees.¿ And, ¿I thought if I repeated a word enough it would change its meaning.¿ Elizabeth Hughey holds up and examines the things handed down to us¿from patterned wing backs and chipped tea sets to family names and gender roles¿and asks if we should keep any of it or burn it all down and start again.

This debut collection, full of natural images and fable-like storytelling, investigates the precariousness inherent to familial love, grief, and myth-making.

Index of Haunted Houses is an investigation of longing and belonging, of haunting as a mode of living.

These off-kilter love poems deconstruct the historical, pop-culture imbibed tropes of American queerness. Cerebral, stunning.