Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

A collection of poems. An excerpt from the book: Bowl of the lake. Bowl of the sky. Bowl of the lake with the sky in it. You looked at you in the water. The blizzard is cold. And the boy in the blizzard is blue.

Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored after 222 years at war. In her stunning poetry debut, Pamela Hart concentrates on the fears and psychological battles suffered by parents, lovers, and friends during a soldier's absence and return home, if indeed there's a return. With honest grit and compassionate imagination, Hart describes her own experience having a son overseas, incorporating lyric meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, oral histories, and classic literature to construct a documentary-style narrative very much situated in the now. Blending reality with absurdism and guided openly by a Calvino kind of logic, Hart reveals to us a crucial American point of view.

Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of "Silver Springs," Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now-GIFs, smartphones, YouTube-with a classical lover's lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but more critically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. "This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it's ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it's ours." All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.

Thought That Nature identifies and captures moments when the border between personal consciousness and the otherness of the physical become porous. Ironically, it also allows Moody to measure the distance between consciousness and direct experience, even as he casts this gap in memorable speech. This debut collection offers the reader sensual delight and intellectual pursuit - a rare and bracing combination.

Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, imperialism, toxic masculinity. Surreal and satirical, Mishler channels the voices of disillusioned middle management alongside the freewheeling imaginative vision of children to disrupt the fixity of our received ideas.

At the center of this stellar collection are three sisters and their imaginative fear of grief. Their great-uncle was bitten by a shark, their mother has a brain tumor, their neighbor hangs himself from a tree-and to cope with these very real terrors, the oldest sister creates an intimate fantasy world. We hear stories of a mountain lion that slaughters a deer, a transparent body washed up on a beach, a selkie who ventures to shore and becomes their mother: "On land her pelt was heavy / like stewed velvet, so she taught herself / to take it off." The sisters' environment of ocean and sand, forests and farmhouses, forms a lush backdrop to many of these poems. But later, as the speaker ages, we find ourselves in the mountains, in an art museum, in a spacecraft where a recorded voice "has the soft accent of someone only a generation or two removed from Earth." The voice in these poems is the perfect mix of grief and imagination, quiet and explosion. Stay Safe is delicate and extraordinary, a powerful debut.

Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Michael Homolka’s Antiquity offers the present infused with the past, from Ancient Greece to the Holocaust to contemporary battlefields. A haunting and evocative debut.

This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of their presence the way spirits in haunted houses trod over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. The poems are Koan-like-the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving this sense of haunting and loss is money, which Davis describes as "federal bone" boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, "seven/standing men/tall" fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. Though they often specify dates, there's an equality to the hauntings-every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. If there really was a 1980 or 1848 or 1499, Davis implies it is somewhere. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad - a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.