Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

• Book was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, joining a growing list of successful poetry debuts, including Michael Kleber-Digg's collection Worldly Things, which has sold more than 4,000 copies • Author is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China; his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. • Book's engagement with history and identity, transnationalism (China and the U.S.), the Covid-19 pandemic, and Maosit/Post-Maoist China will appeal to a wide readership

The women in Allison Adair's debut collection, luminous and electric from the first line to the last-live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being "the planet's stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails." And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. "What if this time," they ask, "instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have." Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, "from before... from a similar injury or kiss.