"In a book-length series of persona poems, Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of Americans whose lives have been predominantly ignored by contemporary mainstream culture. Through the eyes of a teenage girl growing up in a trailer park and a retired veteran sharing an apartment with an Afghan refugee, Iwen reveals the everyday heartbreak and beauty experienced by people living at the periphery of the nation's consciousness. Roze and Blud is gritty, gut-wrenching, gorgeous, and ultimately transcendent. It is a Spoon River Anthology for the 21st Century, a Waste Land for the heartland. Roze and Blud is a virtuoso performance, the kind of book that fundamentally transforms the way you see the world after you have experienced it... because you don't read it, you experience it. In addition to winning the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Roze and Blud was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Green Rose Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the Wheeler Prize and the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes"--

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize A translator's notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky's Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book's guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another. Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets--not just their work--appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks. The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original--from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Like nesting dolls, the poems in I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First contain scenes within scenes, inviting the reader over and over again to sharpen focus on minute details that, though small, reveal much about human perception and imagination. Angie Mazakis handles these layers of revelation with great tenderness. Her poems wander in the way that a curious mind wanders, so that even though they often end very far from where they started, they are anchored in the familiar, referring to experiences we all share: a moment of distraction in a coffee shop imagining a conversation with someone across the room, or a narrative built around the expressions of the cartoon people on the airplane seatback safety guide. I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First is a testament to the notion that whether through a cosmic or microscopic lens, “You just see one moment; you just see now.”

Winner, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Winner, 2020-2021 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award In this long poem—almost a novel-in-verse—Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of two would-be poets: Roze Mertha, a teenage girl growing up in a trailer park, and William Blud, a veteran navigating age and loneliness in an apartment he shares with an Afghan refugee. Deftly crafting distinct voices for these characters in the upper midwestern terrain they inhabit, Iwen explores the quiet heartbreak and tenderly treasured experiences of two apparently unremarkable people using poetry to understand a world that doesn’t make much space for them.