Allison Benis White Wins UNT Rilke Prize

The University of North Texas has announced that Allison Benis White is the winner of the 2018 Rilke Prize for her collection Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books). The Rilke Prize celebrates a mid-career poet. This is the seventh year that UNT has bestowed the $10,000 prize to a deserving collection and writer. In its press release, UNT's Creative Writing, English Department announces:

Allison Benis White’s Please Bury Me in This, published by Four Way Books, has won the 2018 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. A Q&A and reception for White will be held on Wednesday, April 11, at UNT on the Square and a campus reading will take place on Thursday, April 12, 2018.

In her moving book-length meditation on language and bereavement, Please Bury Me in This, the poet Allison Benis White writes, “In the museum of sadness, in the museum of light— // I would climb so carefully inside the glass coffin and lower the lid.” The book enacts just such an attempt, to enter the space of the unspeakable—the suffering of those lost to suicide—and to speak there, but the gestures of longing remain fraught, haunted by hopelessness, destined to begin and begin again. The suicide note, the letter to the dead, the message scrawled by a death camp victim and buried in a jar—they resonate as modes of singing, of reaching toward the inaccessible, whose radical mystery remains, and therein resides a measure of the music’s beauty, its power to hold us, if only briefly, in its glass. Out of the mouth, a ring of gray against a wall. Out of emptiness, a listening, an inconsolable compulsion to “assemble the soul.”

Learn more via UNT's Department of English.