Leigh Anne Couch – författare

Dan Albergotti's Candy is a book steeped in sound and silence. Sound in the form of song, of chaotic cacophony, and of the drone (sometimes natural, sometimes manufactured) that creates the ambient soundtrack of history and the seemingly apocalyptic present. Silence in the sense both of the void's innate quietude and of the failure to speak of people either dumbstruck or in denial, not speaking because they cannot or will not. Throughout this collection, these sounds and intermittent silences provide the rhythm for poems that question the nature of truth and myth, and that restlessly search for meaning in a reticent universe, ultimately unwilling to take no for an answer as they strive to find an ever-elusive yes.

How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun's Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.

Driving the Beast is a book about movement. Christopher Bakken's poems shift between Greece and the American Midwest, tracking the restless nature of selfhood, while seeking glimpses of the sacred in landscapes scarred by history and political turmoil. The book's back-and-forth mirroring invites readers to confront their own reflections in moments of catastrophe and wonder, and to view them alongside those of immigrants and refugees.

Chelsea Whitton's debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and what they are doing, provide an occasion for lyric expansiveness and periodic bathos, including elegies for June Carter Cash, Patsy Cline, the author's father, an ex-cat, and others. At the heart of the collection is a rhyming sonnet crown that offers a wicked inversion of the book's larger vision by constructing an apocalyptic mythology of matrilineal inheritance reliant on resistance, destruction, and martyrdom as much as on cycles of creation and healing.

Lyndon Johnson focuses on the five-plus years of Johnson's presidency (1963–1969), a tumultuous time in which the promise of progressive social programs and basic human rights was countered by a war that killed millions of people and devastated the lives of countless more. As Johnson tried to pull the United States closer to some of its professed ideals, he also undermined many Americans' faith in government, the contradictions of which are still felt to this day. Throughout a carefully wrought and narratively propulsive book-length poem, Jonathan Farmer implicates himself, questioning what it means to belong in America, amid widespread inequality and the great historical inheritance of violence. Farmer reflects on his own upbringing, his relationship with his father who served in Vietnam, and the implications of the sixties for our world today. Unfolding over seven sections, plus an epilogue, the book begins immediately after John F. Kennedy's death as Johnson is thrust into the seat of power, and spans the entire Johnson presidency, capturing both broad portions of history and fascinatingly minute detail. All the while we understand Farmer's own frustration with America as it stands today, still far away from the ideals of the 1960s, still unable to fulfill its promise. Yet, ultimately, Lyndon Johnson is a hopeful work, filled with longing for a country that could still follow through on its putative ideals.