Winner of the 2025 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Diane Seuss
A genre-bending poetry collection about female friendship and desire
Relief chronicles the relationship between the speaker, a printmaker, and her best friend, Eileen, from early wounds to later betrayals. After a devastating childhood accident for which the printmaker feels she is to blame, the two friends grow into an adult dynamic marked by the speaker’s longstanding guilt and Eileen’s tragic, reckless, sometimes manipulative, charm. But when the beloved “you” of the collection wavers in affection between the two women, the friendship, and shared sense of self, fractures. 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