A formally inventive debut collection of poetry driven by narrative and character.
 
In this poetry collection, JD Debris focuses on characters who live on society’s outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book’s heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sánchez as he avenges his sister’s sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy “man in dusk-colored glasses.” As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves.
 
The Scorpion’s Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts—boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion’s tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension.
 
The Scorpion’s Question Mark was the winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize.
 

Poems reflecting on contemporary political issues, mythological origins, and the capacity for hope in the face of uncertain futures.  
 
This collection weaves together themes of motherhood, immigration, social transformation, and interrogation. Throughout Seed Celestial, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers—as she looks to an uncertain future.
 
Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, and feminism while working from her own experience of raising a young daughter, she writes, “You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else.” Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant’s daughter using the myths of Demeter and Persephone. This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender, and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don’t. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.
 
Seed Celestial is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Eileen Myles.
 

In Skull Cathedral, Melissa Wiley pulls stories from the vestigial remnants of the creatures we were or could have become. The appendix, pinky toes, tonsils, male nipples, wisdom teeth, and coccyx are starting points through which Wiley explores exaltation, eroticism, grief, and desire. Using the slow evolution and odd disintegration of vestigial organs to enter the braided stories of the lives we establish for ourselves, the people we grieve, and the mysteries of youth, memory, and longing, Wiley’s lens is deeply feminist and compassionate.

Turning to these mysterious anatomical remnants, she finds insight into the lingering questions of loss and the nagging sensations of being incomplete. For instance, in considering the appendix, Wiley finds herself working through her grief after the loss of her father, a sensation that again resurfaces in the face of the moon as she looks to the sky. Testing the boundaries of genre and fighting to expand the limits of perception, the stylized essays of Skull Cathedral embrace the strangeness of life through the lingering peculiarities of the human body. Skull Cathedral, Wiley’s second book of nonfiction, won the 2019 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.
 

In Skull Cathedral, Melissa Wiley pulls stories from the vestigial remnants of the creatures we were or could have become. The appendix, pinky toes, tonsils, male nipples, wisdom teeth, and coccyx are starting points through which Wiley explores exaltation, eroticism, grief, and desire. Using the slow evolution and odd disintegration of vestigial organs to enter the braided stories of the lives we establish for ourselves, the people we grieve, and the mysteries of youth, memory, and longing, Wiley’s lens is deeply feminist and compassionate.

Turning to these mysterious anatomical remnants, she finds insight into the lingering questions of loss and the nagging sensations of being incomplete. For instance, in considering the appendix, Wiley finds herself working through her grief after the loss of her father, a sensation that again resurfaces in the face of the moon as she looks to the sky. Testing the boundaries of genre and fighting to expand the limits of perception, the stylized essays of Skull Cathedral embrace the strangeness of life through the lingering peculiarities of the human body. Skull Cathedral, Wiley’s second book of nonfiction, won the 2019 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.
 

Poems that imagine a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death.
 
Shayla Lawz’s debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.
 
speculation, n. won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.

Poems that imagine a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death.
 
Shayla Lawz’s debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.
 
speculation, n. won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.