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.”
—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
“Here is a primer on the movements of the soul, which will surprise, delight, and offer solace.”
—Christopher Merrill, author of Flares
“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. It’s a collection rife with radical acts of ordinary, reverent generosity—sorely needed after all these months spent largely apart from the world.”
—Eric Smith, The Sewanee Review
“Brimming with pathos…”
—Publishers Weekly
“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, it’s the attention to emotion and image that makes this debut poignant and specifically brilliant.”
—Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied