{"title":"Firecracker Award Finalists - Poetry - 2026","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"the-choreic-period-poems","title":"The Choreic Period: Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eA ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy. \u003c\/b\u003eLatif Askia Ba--an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy--honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. \"This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo.\" Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader: \"I am not here to accommodate you\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\"\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBecause these poems are not so much \u003ci\u003efor\u003c\/i\u003e you as they are \u003ci\u003ewith\u003c\/i\u003e you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.With startling nuance, \u003ci\u003eThe Choreic Period\u003c\/i\u003e encourages us to \"relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,\" all to see and sing the vital \"thing that we be.\"","brand":"Latif Askia Ba","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44381176201258,"sku":"9781639551187","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/the-choreic-period-poems-6863677.jpg?v=1779335466"},{"product_id":"13-questions-for-the-next-economy-new-selected-works","title":"13 Questions for the Next Economy: New \u0026 Selected Works","description":"Susan Briante, award-winning poet and chronicler of globalization, The Great Recession, and the militarization of daily life, returns with \u003ci\u003e13\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eQuestions for the Next Economy.\u003c\/i\u003e This visionary collection, from the author of the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus prize-winning \u003ci\u003eDefacing the Monument\u003c\/i\u003e, weaves together selections from her four previous books with arresting new poems and visuals. Across these pages, NAFTA, industrial ruins, falling market indices, and the archives of state violence form interdependent constellations. A child is born, parents die, and an economic system continues to extract its lethal toll. \"Where does the riot begin?\" Briante asks. Here, in poetry that charts how too-late capitalism desecrates contemporary lives. Adopting the aesthetics and the urgency of the zine, Briante's work charts interconnected constellations of economic and political systems that govern our lives. These systems (like language) leave their mark on everything. And yet, poems resist. In a perfect world, you would pick up this book from a blanket laid out on a sidewalk alongside knock-off Doc Martens, old magazines, cellophaned wrapped candy, and small bundles of wildflowers. You might not pay for it. You'd read it, make a copy, pass it on.","brand":"Susan Briante","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44381176332330,"sku":"9781955992664","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/13-questions-for-the-next-economy-new-selected-works-8357427.jpg?v=1779335466"},{"product_id":"heirloom","title":"Heirloom","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eShortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025 \u003cbr\u003e Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025 \u003cbr\u003e A Poetry Book Society Commendation\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e 'How the noise in my head grows and grows, \u003cbr\u003e splinters into phantoms and shapes, \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e graceless muses for her cot-mobile. \u003cbr\u003e How I terror.' \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Catherine-Esther Cowie","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44381176594474,"sku":"9781800174795","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/heirloom-7004492.jpg?v=1779335466"},{"product_id":"seabeast","title":"Seabeast","description":"Organized as an alphabetical bestiary, \u003ci\u003eSeabeast\u003c\/i\u003e lyrically catalogues whale species by common name and behaviors, resulting in a poetic compendium that defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination. In his fifth full-length collection, Rajiv Mohabir winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species. In anthropomorphizing these complex mammals, Mohabir argues, we overwrite and erase their sublime difference and selfhood, their distinct and separate experience of embodiment; yet, in refusing to recognize the familiarities of whale behavior and social patterns, we subjugate these magnificent creatures, affirming a hierarchy that establishes anything inhuman as inherently less than human and enabling cruelty toward all manner of living things. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Mohabir's language ingeniously plumbs the depths, illustrating how the objectification fundamental to the construction and preservation of animal taxonomy mirrors the internecine violence of humankind on both a broad and intimate scale. \"We were misnamed \/ again and again: first \u003ci\u003eHindu\u003c\/i\u003e, \/ then \u003ci\u003eHindoo\u003c\/i\u003e, then \u003ci\u003eIndian\u003c\/i\u003e, then \/ \u003ci\u003eCoolie\u003c\/i\u003e, all subhuman \/ much like this precursory cetacean \/ of the Eocene, named \/ in Latin \u003ci\u003egreat lizard--\u003c\/i\u003e \/ anguilliform, what to make \/ of twist and tear, teeth \/ gnashing sharks and durodons \/ into pulp, judged by fossilized \/ gouges in enamel and finger \/ holes on skulls?\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Through the invention of race, the conquest and consumption of land, and the cultural amnesia enforced on the subaltern, imperialism threatens human survival on this planet just as we have misunderstood, taken captive, and hunted whales nearly to extinction. Meditating on the results of genetic testing, Mohabir details how, like his white ex-spouse's \"ancestors \/ from northern Germany \/ played bone flutes \/ for their dead at gravesites,\" a lab \"one day exhumed\" them all \"in perfect pentatonic scales.\" Meanwhile, he wonders what of his Indo-Caribbean heritage, complicated by the obfuscating forces of indenture, ethnic oppression, and frequent relocation, \"can be revived\" from this \"\u003ci\u003ewastebasket taxon\u003c\/i\u003e, \/ us unnamed hoard of no future?\" Of the Irrawaddy Dolphin once \"known for \/ herding shoals of fish \/ for fisherfolk \/ in whose nets \/ they now drown,\" Mohabir observes that \"learning human \/ language opens you \/\/ to betrayal.\" \"Trust me,\" he urges, \"though I am no \/\/ hairless dolphin-- \/ I once had a husband.\" Standing at the confluence of these prehistoric, mythological, and contemporary tributaries feeding our attitude toward whales, Mohabir asks, who is the seabeast, really? The namer or the named? The answer prompts us to see that, if we recognize the legacy of human barbarism in the whale's long history with us, we can also locate a new reserve of resilience and survival. It is their example Mohabir uses, not the \"bright honey\" of their blubber that once would \"fuel lanterns,\" to power his own spiritual refortification. \"Maybe I will, from filling my lungs, blood \/ rushing to my core, \/ into a finned thing, \/ transform.\"","brand":"Rajiv Mohabir","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44381176889386,"sku":"9781961897489","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/seabeast-3794779.jpg?v=1779335466"},{"product_id":"pastoral-1994","title":"Pastoral, 1994","description":"\u003cp\u003eJoe Wilkins' \u003ci\u003ePastoral, 1994\u003c\/i\u003e calls compellingly into the lyric quietness, labor, and rituals of the rural West and its communities, bringing readers close to the earth, to the ditches, to the \"flowery stink of alfalfa \/ hot breath of wheat.\" Enfolding its reader in a living, breathing landscape, this collection tenderly approaches the lives--of humans, of sheep, of cottonwood, and barn owl--that collide and entangle with each other. With a gentle yet appraising regard for the richly layered concepts of childhood and masculinity, \u003ci\u003ePastoral, 1994\u003c\/i\u003e leans in and listens to the prairie and those living there.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Joe Wilkins","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44381177151530,"sku":"9798988137856","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/pastoral-1994-2795349.jpg?v=1779335466"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/firecracker-award-finalists-poetry-2026.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}