This twenty-first winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry unravels the landscapes of childhood migrations and passages across oceans and continents, seasons and languages, mapping the geographies of longing, loss, grief, and conflict--Provided by publisher.

Skin is the 11th winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry Prize, awarded by Texas Tech University Press and named in honor of a former TTUP poetry editor. Lindner, who teaches English at St. Joseph's University, seems well-deserving. She has a sharp eye for detail: daylight, rationed by Venetian slats, the white moth of a kiss / blown from a boy's plump lips, burnt / sienna moustache, milky way of red freckles - these are picked at random from just two pages. She also has a well-nigh flawless ear for lyrical phrases graced by the uneven rhythm extolled by the French symbolist Paul...

"Horse and Rider" takes its title from a passage in the book of Exodus: Sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has cast into the sea. Melissa Range s poems explore violence and power, particularly as those concepts relate to religion and to the natural world. Her mixture of free and formal verse is populated with warriors, weapons, animals, and figures from the Bible and mythology. In a galloping triptych of ancient and apocalyptic visions, these vigorous poems probe the recurring image of the horse and its sometimes troubled, sometimes loving relationship...

In her first volume of poetry, novelist Sarah Strong celebrates silence and what can be learned when we wait and listen. In this stillness, she shows us, we may hear answers to questions we have learned not to ask. Exploring how our subtlest gestures speak our most passionate concerns, she maps the intricacies of body the fingers of a hand, the work of breathing with the same dexterity she investigates what inspires a mother to demolish a kitchen wall or a lover to change genders. Strong also examines spiritual experience in Buddhist practice, in re-imagined biblical narratives, and in the...

"Coming of age as a Jewish woman in America"
In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman s relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies, a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if...

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in "Service" is truthcomplex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossibleabout the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the...

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in "Service" is truthcomplex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossibleabout the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the...