Courtney Bush Wins 2022 National Poetry Series

We are thrilled to announce that Courtney Bush has been named one of five winners of the 2022 National Poetry Series. Her manuscript I Love Information was selected by poet Brian Teare and will be published here at Milkweed Editions in August 2023. In addition to publication, Bush will receive $10,000.

Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of the chapbook Isn’t This Nice? (blush_lit, 2019), and the full-length poetry collection Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022). Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. She lives and works as a nanny in New York.

 Brian Teare, author of The Empty Form Goes All The Way to Heaven, describes I Love Information as follows:

“A paradise of non sequiturs, I Love Information might contain ‘poems forked as a devil road,’ but each one proves a jump cut’s the quickest way to a ‘kind of heaven of facts without context, clean sources of light.’ A seeker who settles for nothing less than maximum amplitude, Courtney Bush heads ever toward ‘things so mysterious we shouldn’t bother with explaining,’ her poems a means to ‘entering sacred time recklessly,’ now with the gusto and bumptious charm of Christopher Smart, now with the sibylline intelligence of Rilke, and always with the antic candor of a digital native. Information at root means to give form to, and I too love the way these exciting, excitable poems give new form to the world I think I know by revealing the plurality of worlds quickly spinning within it.”

 Previous winners published by Milkweed Editions include Ask the Brindled by Noʻu Revilla selected by Rick Barot, Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa, selected by Sally Keith; Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia, selected by Kazim Ali; Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets, selected by Kathy Fagan; feeld by Jos Charles, selected by Fady Joudah; I Know Your Kind by William Brewer, selected by Ada Limón; Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last by Justin Boening, selected by Wayne Miller; Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy, selected by Alex Lemon; Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson, selected by Martha Collins; and Visiting Hours at the Color Line by Ed Pavlić, selected by Dan Beachy-Quick. See all previous winners and books here.

Learn more the National Poetry Series and other prize opportunities here.