Georgia Poetry Prize – serie

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 Jessica Tanck’s debut collection, narrative and lyric converge to confront the marks left by violence, loss, and longing. Winter Here troubles the boundaries between home and the outside world, between reverence and terror, asking whether and where safety can be found in the wake of a mother’s suicide. Both intimate and expansive, this collection revels in pleasure as much as it contends with pain. Whether studying the way a violinist is bruised in the act of playing, invoking the crush of ice around a ship’s hull during a silence, or conjuring a crown of light surrounding strangers speaking in tongues, these poems are unflinching, imaginative, and relentless in their searching. By moving between the explicit and the oblique, pairing scorching imagery with razor-edged thought, Tanck evokes a history that haunts every word and place.