Georgia Poetry Prize

Beautiful and lyrical, Chioma Urama's A Body of Water is a poetic exploration of ancestry in the American South. These poems are the result of a conversation Urama opened with her ancestors, whose documented and oral histories have been fragmented by a history of enslavement. Urama's examination of generational trauma collapses linear time and posits that the traumas of the past are present within the consciousness of our bodies until we transmute the energy surrounding them. The work ebbs and flows between paired-down poems where erasure and white space take on substance and roiling lyric essays that fold in divergent voices from historic documents, music, and film. This collection is both vulnerable and political; a meditation on love and grief; an exploration of loss and connectivity. These poems embrace imagination as a tool to emotionally traverse spaces within history that we are told we cannot enter. A Body of Water is an act of remembering, engaging with the idea that "all water has a perfect memory" and nothing is ever truly lost.

This collection of lyric poems wrestles with a sense of self that has become fragmented by the experience of war. Christopher P. Collins has taken his tours in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, extracted their emotional shrapnel, and examined their toll on his civilian life. He considers the two sides of himself that have been wrought in these parallel lives. One is the self of the citizen-soldier, and the other is the self of the husband and father. His poems reveal the brutal ways in which these selves collide and bleed into one another.

In Chouteau's Chalk, Rosa Lane's poems take a deep dive into the emotional and the erotic. Gender bent, her poems reside amid a tomboy's emerging sexual identity within a world confined by heterosexual construction and its persistent mores. Her collection piques a countermythos that unfolds within a small fishing village opening a forbidden and hidden world with sensorial intensity and lyrical momentum. An epigraph from Audre Lorde's notable work The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power hovers over every poem from birth through marriage, traversing calamities and holograms of desire, giving the "I" permission to assume full agency with power and dignity in a manner that is as acute as revelatory.

This collection of poems speaks to the grief and trauma associated with stillbirth and infertility. But more than that, these poems are concerned with how both parents deal with this trauma without letting it tear them or their relationship apart. There are threads beneath the surface of the poems that speak to the inequality in these relationships and in the male-female dynamic, whether this inequality is perceived or real. Dingman also questions the perception of reality itself when dealing with the traumatized mind. Dingman asks the difficult questions that surround child-rearing. Are the children themselves everything the parents had hoped for? Is there still something missing? She explores the invisibility of the mother after she has children, as well as what a woman is willing to sacrifice in terms of body, country, and relationship. Set against changing political climates in Florida, Canada, and Denmark, these poems navigate the geopolitical differences that influence the experience of parenting.

Soft Apocalypse pirouettes in the "anemic glow" of late capitalism, its prose poems and lyrics performing in the civic pocket, in the offbeat, and by arrhythmias that offer improvisational measures for going on. Chrome angels, strange beloveds, and cool-eyed speakers cut speculative lines through precarious spaces of the present-deserts and nightscapes, neon-lit strips, corner stores, foreclosures, pharmacy queues, and "crumpled back alleys"-making imaginative economies, queer kinships, and alternative ways of being in the world. Nothing here is done with ease, but irreducible gifts do slip surreptitiously from palm to palm: after all, "we all need a little help sometimes / baby." Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these unofficial exchanges and intimate apprehensions against the official orders, projections, violations, and isolations of our time. Instead of calculating toward a dystopic ending, this book bets on its softer wrecks, a futurity in an intimately rewired collective.

In her debut poetry collection, Jasmine Elizabeth Smith takes inspiration from Oklahoma Black history. In the wake of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Jim Waters makes the difficult decision to leave behind his lover, Beatrice Vernadene Chapel, who as a Black woman must navigate the dangerous climate that produced the Jim Crow South and Red Summer. As Beatrice and Jim write letters to one another and hold imagined conversations with blues musicians Ida B. Cox, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Ethel Waters, and the ghosts of Greenwood, the couple interrogates themes of blues epistemology, Black feminism, fraught attachments, and the way in which Black Americans have often changed their geographical regions with the hope of improving their conditions. The poetry collection South Flight is a eulogy, a blues, an unabashed love letter, and ragtime to the history of resistance, migration, and community in Black Oklahoma.