chigger ridge

Poetry. Gritty poems carve her coming-of-age as the speaker dares fear to hold her back. Sandra Lim, who selected chigger ridge to win the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize, says, “These poems sound out the rich ambivalence in the poet’s senses of what makes up a self and its endless enmeshments with the material world. There are country matters here, pastoral concerns woven into impressions of place, family, and the dramas of love and becoming.” Reviewer Nicole Cooley calls the book an “investigation of the ‘dark places’ of both body and landscape. A close look at Southern girlhood and a landscape of mountains, mined, stripped, empty. An investigation of bodies and violence…a brilliant excavation of landscape, language, and escape.” Matt Donovan, author of The Dug-Up Gun Museum, adds, “This is a searing, breathtaking book, a kaleidoscopic exploration of place and self that’s fueled by interjections of astonishment and grief. These poems push against the conventions of language, commingling the colloquial with scraps from the literary canon and sifting obsessively through shards of memory as they grapple toward a truth ‘as plain and massive as the sky.'”