National Poetry Series winners

I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the National Poetry Series, is a vigorous examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which.

Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.

Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.

Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.

This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men.

This National Poetry Series winner defiantly makes space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. These poems stake a claim on the language available to speak about trans experience.

Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, this National Poetry Series winner is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids in rural Appalachia.

Mothers masquerading as witches and sepulchral bellhops who reveal themselves to be fathers: in these poems, nothing is as it seems. Shot through with mournfulness, gorgeously spangled in its language, this National Poetry Series winner illuminates our human failings and the grace we seek.

This National Poetry Series winner follows the multiple transformations—both figurative and literal—that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. From Nancy Drew to Cinderella, the familiar yet surprising speakers of these poems tangle with imitation, performance, and identity.

A handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. This National Poetry Series winner pulls shards of tenderness—and a transformative, regenerative force—from a world where violence and terror infuse the body, a world on the verge of collapse.

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But where—asks this intense and ambitious National Poetry Series winner—is the Color Line in the mind, in the body, between bodies, between human beings?

Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them.