Selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the eighth annual A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize.

A versatile missive written from the intersections of gender, disability, trauma, and survival. “Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead. These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.” Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

Words kill, words give life; they're either poison or fruit--you choose! --Proverbs 18:21 (MSG) What words are you speaking into your life--words of faith or words of doubt? Are you enjoying the remarkable life God has for you, or is your mouth holding you back from a life filled with God's power and blessings? Open Your Big, Bold, Beautiful Mouth seeks to help you learn how to speak the words of faith that can move your life forward in a positive direction, with all the revolutionary results and blessings God has for you. Using the Scriptures along with real-life examples and experiences, this detailed, step-by-step teaching guide provides the principles, tools, and tangible practices you need to create the victorious life God has promised you. Arming yourself with God's Word allows you to overcome problems and challenges, unleash God's power and prosperity, produce results by speaking faith-filled commands, and count your blessings in a joy-filled life. Learn about the supernatural connection between your heart and your mouth, and find out how your words--working through the power of God--can create the life you want to live.

Growing up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the '70s and '80s, Linda Hammerick knows that she is different. She has strong, almost paralysing associations between words and tastes; she doesn't look like everyone else; and she isn't popular at school. She finds her way through life with the help of her great uncle 'Baby' Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend fat-thin-fat Kelly with whom she has been exchanging letters since they were seven. But then a tragedy and a revelation will make her question everything she thought she knew about herself and her family.

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Miriam Bird Greenberg's stunning first collection, which roves across a lush, haunting rural America both real and imagined, observed from railyards and roadsides, evokes the world of myth ("I'd spent my childhood / in a house made of bees; on hot days honey // dripped through cracks in the ceiling," she writes). Yet these capacious, exquisitely tensioned poems are rooted in Greenberg's experiences hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across North America, or draw from her informal interviews with contemporary nomads, hobos, and others living on society's edges. Beneath their surface runs a current of violence, whether at the hands of fate or men: she writes "Everyone knows // what happens to women // who hitchhike, constantly // trying a door to the other world made of lake / bottom or low forest, abandoned house // even wild animals / have rejected." The result is a queering of On the Road, a feminist Frank Stanford at once vulnerable and canny. Richly textured, In the Volcano's Mouth is an extraordinary portrait of life on the enchanted margins.

Tolstoy wrote that happy families are alike and that each unhappy family is unhappy in a different way.In Watch Your Mouth, Daniel Handler takes "different" to a whole new level....

Rotten Perfect Mouth is a wonderfully fresh first book by a poet with an intuitive ear for colourful, musical language. The poems are loose enough for the reader to flop down inside and stay awhile. They are a little goofy, personal, confessional, noisy, nostalgic, and maybe a little bit broken. They often contain boats, boys, and Toronto (street names and railroad tracks, dives and parks and kitchens) because those are the sorts of things Eva Hd is in love with. In Rotten Perfect Mouth, readers will discover a writer with her heart on her sleeve and her hand on her pen, capturing the world around her with startling immediacy.