Books

West Portal, University of Utah Press, July 2021, The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

“The beautiful and the terrible live alongside each other in this work. And so often, they’re actually the same thing. Or they are happening all at once. There is such deep searching in this book and such formal precision. And the language is luminous, which makes the harrowing physical and psychic landscape even more profound. At the center of this world is the ghost of the poet’s sister who proves that ghosts are always the best teachers. They see us.”

—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Contest judge and author of Rocket Fantastic

 “In West Portal, ravishing beauty and ravenous grief braid into utterly lucid and breathtaking poems. The language—deftly scored on the page, rippling with tenderness—radiates with the hushed warmth of an intimate conversation. Ben Gucciardi’s first book has the lyrical depth of a second or third book. It’s an astonishing debut.” 

  —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

“This moving debut contemplates the responsibilities humanity has to both the living and the dead. Brimming with pathos, this memorable collection finds epiphanies in small moments of grief that connect the living to the dead…”

—Publishers Weekly

“Ben Gucciardi’s West Portal reverberates with compassionate intensity. Navigating the tragedy of his sister’s death, its aftermath, and what the living can learn from the dead, these poems spark with tender attention to detail: he reaches into his sister’s ashes expecting their consistency to be like masa and instead feels bone. He brings a thermos of soup to one of his students who has been kicked out of the house by his uncle, and they walk, exchanging stories, by the San Francisco Bay. West Portal asks us, in this great plastic patch of life, how does the poet “un-drown” himself? One way is to dive right into the great scope of being in all of its dazzling, bewildering power.”

   —Sandra Simonds, author of Atopia

“Gucciardi’s poems create space for me in them as a reader and also seem grateful for my being there. They invite me to linger. Stay with me, then, for a second in these lines from “Salve Regina”: “Rufo told me / how each morning his father dusted chili on sliced lemon, / how anything could be a sacrament if you held it right.” It’s a collection rife with such radical acts of ordinary, reverent generosity—sorely needed after all these months spent largely apart from the world.”

—Eric Smith, The Sewanee Review

“West Portal takes place “in the pause between death and tendril,” where the “word for “beauty sounds just like the word for camel, and the phrase I borrowed sometimes means I burned.” In this in-between world, Benjamin Gucciardi shows us a landscape stricken by loss, but also painted with hints of joy some may call reincarnation or a goldfinch’s song. It’s this attention to emotion and image that makes this debut poignant and specifically brilliant like “the red blaze of ice-plants.”

—Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied

“West Portal is a stunning collection of death-haunted poems that not only interrogate the nature of existence but in formally various ways celebrate our brief time on earth. Ben Gucciardi shows how small details, observed or remembered and rendered in lines that sing and soar, make life worth living. Here is a primer on the movements of the soul, which will surprise, delight, and offer solace.”

  —Christopher Merrill, author of Flares

Chapbooks

Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage, May 2021, 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook Prize, Quarterly West

“Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage blends facts, anicient forms, research and a wonderfully poetic take on immersion journalism to yield a piece of dazzling hybridity. Told with incredible command of the many voices it employs, this is a surprising and deeply satisfying meditation on how art can intersect with revolution.”

– Elena Passarello, Contest judge and author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

“Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage resists the existential nature of the written medium to be linear, to connect, to have a beginning, middle, and end. Here, juxtaposition is all, and the ample gaps of white synaptic space between the crots invites the reader to collaborate in the making of meaning in the text. This exploded fiction explodes. It celebrates that to be creative is not about making something new out of nothing but that the new is a consequence of dedicated arrangement, the content re-contextualized. In this compelling fiction, language is embossed, highlighted, and decidedly defamiliarized. Like a kinetic Tinguely sculpture, this articulated structure animates its own expansive destruction and centripetal demise.”

— Michael Martone, citation from the Booth Prize for Unexpected Literature

I Ask My Sister’s Ghost, DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020

Review of I Ask My Sister’s Ghost by Anne Elizabeth Weisgerber

Poem: I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Take me With Her - Poetry Daily, originally published in Harvard Review

Poem: I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Play a Game of Cribbage- Verse Daily, originally published in Southern Indiana Review