The winners of the 2024 Nightboat Poetry Prize are:
Fear of God Essentials by Benjamin Krusling
Performance by Hayley Stahl
Solitude & Society by Scout Turkel
Congratulations to our winners! Read more about each of the prize-winning manuscripts, and find a list of our finalists below.
Fear of God Essentials by Benjamin Krusling
“I believe in crime, the kind God can judge,” writes Benjamin Krusling. The poems in Fear of God Essentials narrate the goings-on of a sticky, discomfiting city, one in which the speaker witnesses a parade of delights and atrocities as they cohere in the present—the Cybertruck on Nostrand Avenue, the Candy Crush–playing cops in the subway station, the subversive humor of living in an era of upheaval. The title, a reference to the streetwear brand, recontextualizes claims to God-fearingness as not a vaunted American value but yet another form of hollow American sloganeering; the strangeness of seeing this phrase emblazoned on the chest/the thighs/the backs of people passing by on the sidewalk. Attuned to sound and vision, Krusling’s “I” genuflects before image in a masterful series of lists that detail the material world: money, pills, babies, Red Lobster, heroism, stupidity, etc. The poet rides the bus, seeing the bare visage, the barred facade, of the city. “Let my poem be a rocket in a bureaucrat’s ethically denuded face.” Indeed. Krusling articulates the horrific banality—like a pair of luxury sweatpants—of living in the heart of a society structured by myriad forms of domination and their proliferating catastrophes. –Emily Bark Brown & Gia Gonzales
Benjamin Krusling is the author of Glaring and a few chapbooks. They have screened videos and performed sound work at Montez Press Radio, Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, Giorno Poetry Systems, and other venues. Recent writing and multimedia work has appeared in Screen Slate, e-flux journal, Changes, and Triple Canopy.
Performance by Hayley Stahl
Hayley Stahl’s Performance is a formally inventive, genre-defiant work that unfolds as a collage of poems, dreams, psychoanalytic case studies and theatrical dialogue, stitched together by the wry, melancholic voice of the “Food Taster.” What begins as a meditation on attention, intimacy, and selfhood, quickly dilates into an embodied exploration of dissociation, desire, and the strangeness of language itself. Moving through the disorienting textures of modern life–conversations with lovers, therapists, family, and imagined interlocutors–the book is rendered with a voice that is both deadpan and tender. Here, memory becomes porous, and performance is the only constant: “..what I really ought to do is / Cut to the chase / Put some perfume on my ankles / Give in to the theater of it.” –Morgan Levine & Naima Yael Tokunow
Hayley Stahl lives in New York. Her plays include Chairs and Music. Performance is her first book.
Solitude & Society by Scout Turkel
A collection of lyric meditations, Solitude & Society radiates a poetics of attunement that is “gentle but not easy.” Achingly, Scout Turkel’s voice reaches through the blur of loneliness and against the corrosions of grief. These poems comb the unanswerable questions of modernity’s alienation, motherhood and childhood, a poet’s labor, and the dreams that visit us and choose to stay. Gracefully restrained without ever obscuring the heart, these poems keep vigil, then pucker with boldness and humor. Most of all, this subtle debut reminds us that poetry is a devotional practice of being wakeful in the world, especially when one so desperately wants to sleep and sleep. –Destiny Hemphill & Santi Valencia
Scout Turkel was born in California and lives in western Massachusetts. With the poets Samira Abed and Hannah Piette, Scout edits Common Place: A Seasonal Publication of Poetry & Poetics. Scout’s writing can be found online and in print.
Congratulations to our Finalists!
Lapses by Tess Brown-Lavoie
As Long As You Want by Carolyn Ferrucci
Redwork by Stefania Gomez
Surrender No Surrender by Benjamin Gucciardi
Splashed Things by Leigh Lucas
Ars Dialectica by Sati Mookherjee
Mirror Would Be a Beautiful Name for a Child by Tyler Raso
Bathtub Estrogen by Sappho Stanley
Easy Circle Gods by David Wiley
Rushes by Sennah Yee
Thank you to our Screeners!
Jzl Jmz
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Azad Sharma
MaKshya Tolbert
Nora Treatbaby