{"title":"Ballard Spahr Prize For Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the profound and moving poetry of the Ballard Spahr Prize winners. Discover fresh voices and award-winning collections that capture the human experience with striking imagery and emotional depth.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"ballard-spahr-prize-2023-winner-book-caroline-harper-new-9781571315304","title":"Ballard Spahr Prize 2023 Winner","description":"Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.  Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised \/ a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate \/ and prey with the same lure.”  In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tastes the earth for acidity, buries lemons and pennies for balance. Limestone “sucks the sea \/ into little demitasse” and hyacinths “sip the sun \/ black.” A lone elephant wanders into the wilderness of rural Georgia, never to be seen again. But perhaps most arresting about New’s work are the truths told by its strangeness, like the ancient fish who “carved their shape” in a mountain’s peak, or a mother who wears a lifejacket in the bathtub.  Crafted by New’s voracious mind and carried by her matchless lyricism, A History of Half-Birds is a stunning investigation of love’s beastly impulses—all it protects, and all it destroys.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49744260563217,"sku":"NGR9781571315304","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037180002577,"sku":"NIN9781571315304","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52618026451217,"sku":"NLS9781571315304","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1571315306.jpg?v=1751455221"},{"product_id":"short-film-starring-my-beloved-s-red-bronco-book-k-iver-9781639550609","title":"Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco","description":"Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.   In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call \/ himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.   “I say to the water if you were here, \/ you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft \/ fingers tracing it, afraid to touch \/ the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no \/ reason to leave town no hidden \/ torches waiting for us to fall asleep.”   Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible \/ contours of joy.”","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49758731141393,"sku":"CIN1639550607G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50227833569553,"sku":"NGR9781639550609","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50764797935889,"sku":"CIN1639550607VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51042785263889,"sku":"NIN9781639550609","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52671162974481,"sku":"NLS9781639550609","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1639550607.jpg?v=1751310711"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/ballard-spahr-prize-for-poetry-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}