ARGUMENTS, Persea Books, October 2026
The Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award
“These poems chronicle the intimate world in which we experience, question, become. If tragedy is goat song, then these are owl song, calling us back into the sacred fold between old growth fir and feldspar. Back where we belong."
—Danusha Laméris
"Arguments is a book about how to be an American. It travels in orientation and vision with poets who bear witness to our national nightmares, like Galway Kinnell and Denise Levertov, and in spirit with Father Daniel Berrigan and other vocal custodians of our collective conscience. Guiccardi’s resistances in poetry have a precision and artfulness all their own, based in a form that combines conversation and description. The high degree of precision within these soliloquies, present in a well-told story of ecological activism at the center, accomplishes a tenacious but tender intimacy. The goal is to return to community, to restore the self to the structure of earthly reality – no small task. “I wanted my life to be small and here it was,” writes the poet, but why does the world feel grander and more admirable long after one puts this book down?"
—Katie Peterson
“Poems to make you think and cry and maybe love.”
—Rebecca Solnit