UNT Rilke Prize

2024 UNT Rilke Prize

Kevin Prufer's The Fears (Copper Canyon Press) has won the 2024 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. Prufer will be present for two events: Prufer will visit UNT on October 9th and 10th for a reading and book signing.

In The Fears, his ninth collection, Kevin Prufer examines how each of us becomes "a dying animal body," eventually losing what makes us human to sickness, grief, and even the indifference of the nation state. The poems place the ancient Greeks and Romans alongside vivdly rendered portraits of loved ones--a father dying of cancer, for instance--so that the epic, heroic past becomes a lens for meditating on the small, intimate tragedies of the present. And those intimate tragedies in turn yield ways of encountering the larger conflicts of our own historical moment. In lines that slide jaggedly across the page, Prufer moves between what he calls "mundanity" and "vastness," attempting to understand "the erasure of the self / into vastness" and, beyond that erasure, "the failures of empires." Bleak, clear-eyed, bracingly unsentimental, and insistent on the necessity of precise, accurate language, The Fears asks readers to remain politically engaged, to continue caring about the world. The poet urges us, even though we are mortal and will one day end up like Antigone, "nowhere," to keep paying attention to the vivid, haunting moments that comprise our lives: the broken finger of a mummy, a frozen bottle of wine, the "little pink tongue" of a lost kitten.

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UNT Rilke Prize Recipients:

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2023 UNT Rilke Prize

Chris Abani's Smoking the Bible (Copper Canyon Press) has won the 2023 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. Abani will be present for two events: a Q&A on October 4th, 2023, at 6:30 PM in University Union 339 and a reading and book signing on October 5th, 2023, at 8:00 PM in University Union 382.

In his most recent collection, Smoking the Bible, Chris Abani memorializes--through the imaginative journey that poems so often take--a brother who has been given the diagnosis of "Terminal." Alongside this commitment to elegize a loved one is a second voyage. Often in brief portraits, poems diminutive as carved cameos, Abani writes of migrations to new countries and continents, of leaving behind a homeland that is both "wound and suture," a lost landscape whose "persistent aftertaste" follows the speaker everywhere he goes. Smoking the Bible is a book intent on understanding nostalgia, a word that burns with pain and grief, but one that also suggests the "flutter of release." Evocative, rich with sensory detail, Abani's poems transport the reader from Nigeria to America's Midwest, ranging between memory, dream, and revelatory vision. At its heart, Smoking the Bible worries about acts of translation, how difficult it is to translate languages and cultures. And, beyond that, how we struggle to translate the past into present. "I promise / to walk with you as far as I can," the speaker tells his dying brother, the space between death and the living the most difficult translation of all.

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Photos from our October 2023 UNT Rilke Prize events:

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2022 UNT Rilke Prize

Valzhyna Mort's Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision.

Songs of grieving, memory, and witness lie at the center of Valzhyna Mort's latest collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, a book that makes vivid and palpable the upended history of Belarus, a country filled with "forests / of the unburied dead" and tanks driving through the streets. "The empire fell, then snow fell," Mort writes in "Self-Portrait with Madonna on Pravda Avenue," pravda meaning truth, a Russian word that, under Soviet rule implied propaganda, disinformation, and the suppression of free speech. Here, the poet reclaims the word. She restores truth in lines informed by historical insight--invasions and wars, exile, the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl--and by a biting humor so characteristic of the region. "What has kept us alive?" a speaker asks. "Our death songs" is the dry answer. Mort's poems enact both an elegy and an affirmation that survival is possible, that tongues can go on speaking, "tied with a black ribbon of verse."

Photos from our October 2022 UNT Rilke Prize events: