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Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Diane Seuss, Relief by Victoria Kornick is a genre-bending collection of female friendship & desire
Relief by Victoria Kornick chronicles the relationship between the speaker, a printmaker, and her best friend, Eileen, from early wounds to later betrayals. After a devastating childhood accident for which the printmaker feels she is to blame, the two friends grow into an adult dynamic marked by the speaker’s longstanding guilt and Eileen’s tragic, reckless, sometimes manipulative, charm. But when the beloved “you” of the collection wavers in affection between the two women, the friendship, and shared sense of self, fractures. Reversals, repetition, and the language of the print studio shape the collection, as the speaker navigates the mirroring of a girlhood friendship and the impressions left by desire.
PRAISE FOR RELIEF
“Relief is a book of soul mates and shadows, transmutation and loss, sex and scars. I am transfixed by the genre-fluidity of this collection, locating itself at the subterranean nexus between lyric, narrative, and even rhetoric, and drawing on the aesthetic practices of photography and printmaking. Relief, with all of the inflections of that word, builds a myth without precedent, and therefore, a myth anew.”
—Diane Seuss, author of Frank: Sonnets
“Victoria Kornick’s debut collection of poems, Relief, is an antic, irresistible page-turner of a bildungsroman that tracks the vexed and specular friendship of two women from girlhood through young adulthood. Kornick, who can be as wickedly funny as she is shatteringly heartbreaking, deploys the replicative tropes and processes of relief and intaglio printmaking and the “negative” art of photography to make manifest the ways in which trauma, sexuality, jealousy, guilt, and desire by turns bind, blur, and threaten the relationship between our two protagonists. “Who are you, or who do you want to be, is the real question,” Kornick writes, “though we are approaching it obliquely.” As she leans into the ferality of close friendships, Kornick explores “relief” in all of its manifestations—from visible scarring to the alleviating, expelled-breath dilation into true selfhood.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author ofMadrigalia: New & Selected Poems
“Relief is as dynamic and enchanting as the hinterlands its poems attend to: those between girlhood and womanhood, intimacy and loneliness, memory and event, safety and danger, reproduction and original, superposition and fixed outcome, the expressed and the inexpressible. To move through the changeable and quietly sublime climates of this book is to be moved and changed by them in turn.”
—Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch
“Relief will stir and capture readers of all stripes. The book is an ekphrasis of memory and image, as it visualizes and meditates on knotted themes of friendship, girlhood, shame, betrayal, loss, photography, and printmaking, intentionally weaving between emotional clarity and ambiguity to invite the audience into that precise moment of tension. Above all, Relief deftly portrays the details of silence, as it dwells in and imagines wor(l)ds unexpressed, and what might grow in the aftermath—the “grass after the grass is cut.” Which is to say, this book shows us exactly what poetry is capable of. Victoria Kornick is an exquisite storyteller, essayist, and artist, whose sensibility, in my view, will always be that of a lyric poet. To that, I say, thank goodness; how lucky we are to be in her presence through these pages.”
—Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of Find Me as the Creature I Am: Poems
“Victoria Kornick’s brilliant debut collection, Relief, is a breathtaking recalibration of the lyric narrative sequence. Psychologically dense and deeply impassioned, these formally inventive poems follow a devoted friendship that is laced by desire and haunted by a singular violent event in their childhood. Yet, within the arc and tensions of this story, Kornick also asks urgent questions about the nature—and conflicts—of making art, revealing every poet’s ever-present anxiety that language itself might collapse beneath the weight and pressure of one’s lived experience. This thrilling, wise and powerful book is an absolute wonder.”
—David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter
Victoria Kornick is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry 2025, among other publications. Her collection Relief (Sarabande, 2027) was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Community of Writers, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Victoria holds an MFA in Poetry Writing from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow, and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern California.