Wick First Book Series

“The poems in Christine Gosnay’s first book, Even Years, speak with a voice that animates and astonishes us as they delineate and explore, trace and explode, the ‘order of shapes in the light’—the order of words, of moments in a life, of shifts in perspective between the ‘cleave and / Cleave’ of language. In these piercing and evocative poems, we see, as in the poems of Stevens and Dickinson, ‘The back of the eye / where it has been struck by all things’ (‘N-gram’). "Surprising and moving, Gosnay’s work shows us what the ‘clean blue sleeve’ of language can do, and we are transformed and held by this book the way the speaker in the final poem is compelled by a ‘photograph of rose baskets in Morocco’: ‘Nothing on earth could keep me from pressing it to my face.’” —Angie Estes, author of Enchantée and winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Ellen Bass, Judge “A compelling book about origins—of ancestry, memory, and language”—Ellen Bass The Many Names for Mother is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This evocative collection hovers around history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union to the poet’s travels, while pregnant with her son, to death camp sites in Poland. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dasbach ponders how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience comes to influence her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child. A series of poems titled “Other women don’t tell you” becomes a refrain throughout the book, echoing the unspoken or taboo aspects of motherhood, from pregnancy to the postpartum body. The Many Names for Mother emphasizes that there is no single narrative of motherhood, no finite image of her body or its transformation, and no unified name for any of this experience. The collection is a reminder of the mothers we all come from, urging us to remember both our named and unnamed pasts.

Winner of the 2019 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Natalie Diaz, judge i say / my mother’s name, / cristina & desert marigolds / crack through a boulder. / i say my father’s name, martin / & all the novena candles / in the bed of the truck are aglow. These lines from the book’s titular poem “On This Side of the Desert” encapsulate the dominant themes of the collection: the power and meaning derived from the act of naming; the deep interconnectedness of Latinx cultures, a product of strong family traditions and an intimate relationship with the natural world; and a profound spirituality rooted in the sacraments of Catholic orthodoxy. This poem, like many of those in Aguilar’s collection is written from the perspective of a young boy growing up along the Mexican border. As Aguilar chronicles the unique challenges faced by border communities where surviving the desert is a perpetual struggle, and the distress of finding “an entire skeleton in torn clothes” is muted by frequency, he also modernizes the traditional pastoral form to encompass both beauty and trauma. This debut book of poetry describes the experience of being raised in southern California as a child of Mexican immigrants in the shadow of the borderlands. Just as the borderlands are defined by the desert, so, too, are its inhabitants defined by their families, their culture shaped from the clay of the Sonoran desert and given life by the nourishing water of their ancestors. In these poems, the desert is recognized for what it truly is—a living, breathing body filled with both joy and pain.

Winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize “A luminous debut collection of poems.”—Peg Boyers, author of To Forget Venice “Moore explores the difficult territory of all that we cannot explain yet must embrace.”—Jim Daniels, author of The Middle Ages How Blood Works is a collection of poems that considers the way memory, identity, and our very blood take shape in the places we inhabit: rooms, cities, landscapes, and the spaces within the body. Moore examines the idea of bloodlines—literal familial ties and the traumas, secrets, and complex relationships passed from one generation to the next. To explore these motifs, many of the poems borrow from the world of visual art, including painting, sculpture and its resonance with the creation of the self, and architecture, too, as a metaphorical counterweight to nature. In keeping with the central theme that the stories we tell ourselves—and, by extension, our understanding of who we are—are shaped by the spaces in which we tell them, the poems in How Blood Works vary in form. From traditionally lineated lyrics to more architectural, segmented prose pieces, the poems themselves become a space for narratives of the self to play out.

Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—and is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Drawn to Delaney’s painting and personal history through her emotional response to his work, especially his portraits, Arlene Keizer has crafted a diasporic ceremony of remembrance for this Black, gay male visionary. Fraternal Light offers back an answering complexity to Delaney’s life and work. One form of art calls out; another answers. Keizer’s poems make the contours and challenges of Delaney’s life visible, which is especially urgent in a world still frequently hostile or indifferent to Black creative brilliance.