Believer Poetry & Book Awards Winners Announced

Aditi Machado has won the 2018 Believer Poetry Award for her book Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2018). The shortlist made for some stiff competition. Before an excerpt from the book, The Believer gives some context:

Some Beheadings is an apt title for Aditi Machado’s daring debut collection. Her work tends toward a poetics that recalls Dickinson’s: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Machado is our winner because of her talent at so eloquently stating what these poems leave unsaid. Her work here is to allow the reader to work, to trust the minds of those who encounter her poems. We read as participants and not as the entertained. Machado takes the necessary themes that pervade our twenty-first-century moment and depends on lyric impulse to leave them bare in ways that no television news program ever could: “Sand divines my desiccation. So too with culture, / words I use to speak my distance from the desert. / Culture too resides in me an intercourse most internal.” And this book is “internal” in the best way, as over and again it glows with an introspective power, a power that could be wielded only by a human being.

That's not all: this year's Believer Book Award was also presented to a poet. Matthew Rohrer's "dreamlike novel-in-verse," The Others (Wave, 2018) has won the honor, with the editors writing that each "narrative emerges from the one that precedes it, like a Russian nesting doll, producing a sensation of spacious expansion and laying bare the manner by which narratives absorb and give birth to each other." 

Congrats to Machado and Rohrer!