Bees, and after
Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize
selected by Rae Armantrout
The 119th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize places science at the heart of his powerful poems
For John Liles, the 119th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, science and the natural world form a route into the workings of love, of grief, and of joy in the thrum of life. Judge Rae Armantrout calls his poems “dense, sonically gorgeous studies of various natural things and creatures, including light, bees, minerals, shellfish and crabs, insects, and the workings (and failure) of the heart.” Written under the shadow of our changing climate, Liles’s poems are tender elegies but also praise-songs for the continual unfolding richness of the world. Writes Liles, “oh unending animal, / you go where / the light goes.”
Available on Yale University Press.
Following the dog down:
An intimacy of nemotodes
2017
Winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize
selected by Brian Teare
preface by Rae Armantrout
This is a study of parasitic intimacy, of unregressable cohabitation – when an animal finds its one true other and survives consuming them. To be the entire world for another, where we are eaten raw by this need, and the constant effort of a companion to keep our harms small, forgivable. This work lays claim to who ‘we’ are, and new ways speak about ‘us’. This is poetry founded in the biological study of parasitic roundworms and the language through which we have come to understand them. There is something here for all of us – a way of knowing that we are not alone – and the lifelong care that we must attempt for each other. Against our obligated traumas, be gentle and we both survive this.
Available on Omnidawn.
