Winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award
“We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” famously wrote W.B. Yeats. The Arguments of this book – these quarrels with the self – are investigations of conscience. Written in a time of environmental collapse and social unrest, these poems confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life: how to make a self, a family and an ethical life within exploitative systems that demand complicity. Moving through domestic spaces, a climate activist camp, and landscapes of the American West, the collection blends lyric and formal poems to ask urgent questions: What responsibilities to we bear to one another? How are we entangled in the systems we seek to dismantle? What place does violent resistance hold? How do we sustain an inner life in a material-driven world—and how, in the face of grief, do we balance private mourning with collective obligation? Arguments turns to language as a practice of care, tending the fragile links between self and community, human and non-human, the living and the dead.
“Harbors”, American Poetry Review, May/June 2026