Casually Incandescent: Believer Poetry and Book Awards Awarded

The Believer has announced some winners in the world of letters! Firstly, congratulations to Heather Christle, whose book The Trees The Trees has earned her the second-annual Believer Poetry Award. They write of Christle:

“Here is the hand / here is the hand / on my face / it’s not my hand / it’s a beautiful day,” writes Heather Christle at the start of The Trees The Trees, her casually incandescent second collection. Christle writes with the minimalist diction and bare-bones sentence structure popular with today’s youngest generation of poets, and yet she is one of the most gifted at transcending these limitations to create powerful, living experiences—poems that echo everywhere with the skittery pulse of contemporary life...

And the (seventh-annual) Believer Book Award also goes to a poet, but for his novel Leaving the Atocha Station. Of Ben Lerner:

...This book seems to hover between reality and fiction. What’s real? What’s fiction? Lerner gives no clues. But that’s not the point. What’s really real is its deep intelligence and the great pleasure one gets from reading it. Oh, and the opening essay, which takes place in a museum: possibly the most accurate depiction of why we, in this day and age, are more riveted by real life than by any great painting or novel or work of art. Something Lerner is not necessarily happy about. Something this book is destined to fix.