Winner of the 2025 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books, selected by Diane Seuss
A genre-bending poetry collection about friendship, printmaking, and desire
Relief chronicles the relationship between the speaker, who is a printmaker, and her best friend, Eileen. Even as a child, Eileen has theories about life and sex that trouble and transfix the speaker. The friends become one another’s guides and, at times, protectors as they explore muddy shorelines and dark fields, strangers’ swimming pools and early encounters with boys. Then, as a teenager, Eileen has a devastating accident for which the speaker blames herself.
In printmaking, an image flips to become its opposite, and a scarred line creates a beautiful print. So, too, do these poems consider the aftermath of an event, the nature of cause and effect, and the way opposites can depend on each other. As the two friends grow up, they learn about art, go to parties, and stay one another’s confidants. But at the foundation of their dynamic remains the speaker’s longstanding guilt.
When she falls in love with a man who is unfaithful—first, to another woman as he begins to see the printmaker, then to the printmaker herself—the affair’s repercussions alter the course of the printmaker’s life and her relationship with Eileen. In dazzling poetry and lyric prose, Victoria Kornick’s page-turning debut explores the complexities of a friendship that spans three decades. Reversals, repetition, and the language of the print studio shape the collection, as the speaker navigates the mirroring of a girlhood friendship and the impressions left by desire.
PRAISE FOR RELIEF
“Relief is a book of soul mates and shadows, transmutation and loss, sex and scars. I am transfixed by the genre-fluidity of this collection, locating itself at the subterranean nexus between lyric, narrative, and even rhetoric, and drawing on the aesthetic practices of photography and printmaking. Relief, with all of the inflections of that word, builds a myth without precedent, and therefore, a myth anew.” – Diane Seuss
“In Relief, Victoria Kornick explores the many meanings of its title: the relief of survival, the relief print, and the relief of believing the worst has already happened. Moving through friendship, desire, and grief, the collection asks, ‘What if a / woman said what she meant? I love / you or you disgust me or this isn’t my / home or what a relief.’ At once formally inventive and emotionally exact, these poems navigate lyric and narrative with the precision of a printmaker, transforming memory and loss into something vivid and tactile. They reveal how intimacy leaves its impression long after the moment has passed. With haunting wisdom, Relief tenderly unsettles the reader, insisting that ‘absence is a thing itself’ and that ‘a love story is still a love / story, whatever tense it’s in.’” – Diannely Antigua
“Relief is as dynamic and enchanting as the hinterlands its poems attend to: those between girlhood and womanhood, intimacy and loneliness, memory and event, safety and danger, reproduction and original, superposition and fixed outcome, the expressed and the inexpressible. To move through the changeable and quietly sublime climates of this book is to be moved and changed by them in turn.” – Tess Gunty
“Victoria Kornick’s debut collection of poems, Relief, is an antic, irresistible page-turner of a bildungsroman that tracks the vexed and specular friendship of two women from girlhood through young adulthood. Kornick, who can be as wickedly funny as she is shatteringly heartbreaking, deploys the replicative tropes and processes of relief and intaglio printmaking and the ‘negative’ art of photography to make manifest the ways in which trauma, sexuality, jealousy, guilt, and desire by turns bind, blur, and threaten the relationship between our two protagonists. ‘Who are you, or who do you want to be, is the real question,’ Kornick writes, ‘though we are approaching it obliquely.’ As she leans into the ferality of close friendships, Kornick explores ‘relief’ in all of its manifestations—from visible scarring to the alleviating, expelled-breath dilation into true selfhood.” – Lisa Russ Spaar
“Victoria Kornick’s brilliant debut collection, Relief, is a breathtaking recalibration of the lyric narrative sequence. Psychologically dense and deeply impassioned, these formally inventive poems follow a devoted friendship that is laced by desire and haunted by a singular violent event in their childhood. Yet, within the arc and tensions of this story, Kornick also asks urgent questions about the nature—and conflicts—of making art, revealing every poet’s ever-present anxiety that language itself might collapse beneath the weight and pressure of one’s lived experience. This thrilling, wise and powerful book is an absolute wonder.” – David St. John
“Relief will stir and capture readers of all stripes. The book is an ekphrasis of memory and image, as it visualizes and meditates on knotted themes of friendship, girlhood, shame, betrayal, loss, photography, and printmaking, intentionally weaving between emotional clarity and ambiguity to invite the audience into that precise moment of tension. Above all, Relief deftly portrays the details of silence, as it dwells in and imagines wor(l)ds unexpressed, and what might grow in the aftermath—the ‘grass after the grass is cut.’ Which is to say, this book shows us exactly what poetry is capable of. Victoria Kornick is an exquisite storyteller, essayist, and artist, whose sensibility, in my view, will always be that of a lyric poet. To that, I say, thank goodness; how lucky we are to be in her presence through these pages.” – Emily Jungmin Yoon