Marking Aiden Heung’s debut collection, All There Is to Lose is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. The selecting judge, National Book Award Finalist Ilya Kaminsky, praises the resonant particularities and depth of feeling found in these poems, which convert “elegy [into] its driving force.” Poet Esteban Rodriguez observes, “With language that is as tender as it is narratively absorbing, Aiden Heung draws our attention to the tiny but never forgotten village of 915, tucked in the heart of Southwest China. Regardless of the harsh realities of seasonal drought, of the ever-present darkness lingering on the mountainside, of a river whose literal burdens become symbolic, and of the men and women who cycle on the periphery of our speaker’s childhood.” The result is a stunning achievement of a first book, what Kaminsky identifies as an exemplar of “that ages-old mode of poetry wherein the poet uses language to break bread with the dead, to bring them back to life, if only for the moment, for a portion of the moment, an instant, before the line breaks.” Channeling the poet as medium, “I am the tension on the bow that draws the arrow,” Heung writes in “Epilogue.” “To lose myself — that is my destiny.” 

Aiden Heung (he/they) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous town. After working as a traveling salesman for years, he recently relocated to St. Louis, USA. His poems have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, 声韵诗刊 (Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine), and many other places. He is a finalist for the DISQUIET Prize, a winner of the International Proverse Poetry Prize, and the recipient of 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. He and his work have been generously supported by Varuna, The National Writers' House (Australia) and Swatch Art Peace Hotel residency (Switzerland/ Shanghai, China). He holds an MFA in creative writing from Washington University.