Foxlogic, Fireweed (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Jennifer K. Sweeney's Foxlogic, Fireweed follows a lyrical sequence of five physical and emotional terrains--floodplain, coast, desert, suburbia, and mesa--braiding themes of nature, domesticity, isolation, and human relationships. These are poems of the earth's wild heart, its searing mysteries, its hollows, and its species, poems of the complex domestic space, of before and after motherhood, gun terror, the election, of dislocation and home, and of how we circle toward and away from our centers. Sweeney is not afraid to take up the domestic and inner lives of women, a nuanced relationship with the natural world that feels female or even maternal, or a duty to keeping alive poetry's big questions of transcendence, revelation, awe, and deep presence in the ordinary.