The Summer After

The Summer After is the winner of the twenty-fourth New Criterion Poetry Prize. Beauty, glamour, vitality, love—and their fragility or resilience in a chaotic world—animate the poems in The Summer After. Drawn from travels real and imaginary, immersed in landscapes set loose by perpetual motion, these playful yet poignant encounters with aesthetic opulence journey through the exquisite kinesis of becoming, choreographing delicate fluctuations in the permeability between self and other, past and present, growth and decay, nature and art. Tempering ebullience with technique, passion with wit, their shapely stanzas and sinuous cadences uphold as their destination—their utopia, so to speak—a language limber enough to embody, and durable enough to preserve, moments in which sensory intensity gives way to illumination. Light glancing off Murano glass, reflections in a puddle, a tower carved from quartz, and other glittering images constitute the discoveries in this exuberant debut.