Winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith; this collection of formalist poetry is part ode, part elegy, and serves as a heartfelt journey in overcoming grief and falling back in love with the world. Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering. Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning “Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take” and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with “a hand / for one moment holding / another hand. Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.
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