Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, as well as Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Washington Post, the Guardian, The Nation, and elsewhere.

"Return Flight is an attentive but effulgent but joyously aching book.”—Jos Charles, 2021 Judge

When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Jennifer Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.”

Read more»

"A book for the age of the cloud, a volume of poetry that is at once novelistic and intensely lyrical." —KHALED MATTAWA, 2019 Judge

What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. “An emptying drain, driven by gravity.” And in Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power.

Read more»

“The work of a poet who sings, boldly, across the distances between us.” —SRIKANTH REDDY, 2017 JUDGE

Can one person be addicted to another? Can two souls be twinned? Georg Trakl was a well-known Austrian poet; Grete, his sister, was a musical prodigy but much less is known about her. Both addicted to drugs, Grete committed suicide three years after Georg’s overdose. In these imagined letters from Grete to her brother, Bailey contemplates the erasure of women’s inner lives from history.

Read more»