Encounter Books

The Summer After is the winner of the twenty-fourth New Criterion Poetry Prize. 

In his debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, Peter Vertacnik depicts a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of both received and nonce poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, both recent and long past (“Face Value,” “Odd Elegy,” “Trace,”); the memories of old houses and towns left behind (“Departure,” Sugar Beets,” “Mourning Doves”); and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous analog particulars (“Apology to Candles,” “Dial Tone,” “In Praise of Blank Cassettes”). It is indeed a book of elegies, but one that also celebrates the people, places, and things it laments, preserving their names and details while laying them to rest. 

The Nature of Things Fragile is the winner of the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize.

Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeur’s fourth collection, grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of midwestern American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragi-comic, this book explores the perils of digital technologies, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress, asking how much pleasure and hardship the human heart can bear. Brodeur’s narrative poems feature a dramatis personae rare in contemporary poetry, including a Syrian refugee enrolled in a writing workshop, the wife of an accused serial killer shopping defense lawyers, a horny psychoanalyst confessing a dream, and a carpenter working for the Department of Education during New York City’s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts. 

In Transit, Nicholas Pierce’s debut poetry collection, charts the poet’s maturation across three sections, each centering on a different kind of love, from the pedagogical to the romantic to the familial. Form and subject are inseparable in poems that consider the complex power dynamic of an older man befriending a younger one, that draw on such classic texts as Plato’s Symposium and Homer’s Odyssey to make sense of the seemingly random encounters and missed chances that, as one poem puts it, “make up a life.”

As the book’s title suggests, these poems take place on the move, in cars, on boats and planes. They find the speaker abroad, as in “The Death of Argos,” a sonnet sequence that invents a new configuration for the form. Above all, though, the poems of In Transit attempt to capture a world in flux, turning to form as a stay against the transitory nature of experience.