Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

• Book was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, joining a growing list of successful poetry debuts, including Michael Kleber-Digg's collection Worldly Things, which has sold more than 4,000 copies • Author is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China; his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. • Book's engagement with history and identity, transnationalism (China and the U.S.), the Covid-19 pandemic, and Maosit/Post-Maoist China will appeal to a wide readership

The women in Allison Adair's debut collection, luminous and electric from the first line to the last-live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being "the planet's stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails." And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. "What if this time," they ask, "instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have." Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, "from before... from a similar injury or kiss.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson's Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology's impact on connection and power.Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don't exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named "Nia," who her boss calls "his type"; she loses hours researching "June," an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day "trying to break" a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevenson's poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams "about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints." With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own-where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: "I want to say better."

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert's Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into "a thousand red granules." Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. "I left that town / forever," Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave-if it's ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry's power to tame it. "I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You'll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground." Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish-"your hair, your ears, your hands."-leaving behind "the fucked up / trees," the "long, cold river." In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life."It is clear now that there are no ends," Holbert writes, "Just winters." Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.