Bøker i Iowa Poetry Prize-serien

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.