Warble The Birdy Poetry Prize

The poems in Alicia Rebecca Myers's debut collection explore a fascination with the phenomena within and beyond a person - whether becoming a mother or observing a sea turtle migration. The language is rich with metaphor but conversational and direct, with a compelling balance between prose and lineated poems. Myers finds in the everyday, in oxidized pesto and a crepe paper streamer, new ways of expressing shared experiences. She captures the full range of human emotion - sadness, grief, humor, and overarching love - as the poems process taking care of one aging parent in the wake of losing the other. Warble also contextualizes what it means to be a daughter and a mother in modern-day America by offering snapshots of pop culture and the wider American experience, from Love Is Blind to gun violence. This is a book that asks of us, "In a lifetime, what do we keep, and what do we release? What sings on beyond our time, and how are we immortalized by that music?"