Arguments
Persea Books, October 2026
The Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award
“Poems to make you think and cry and maybe love.”
—Rebecca Solnit
“Thoughtful and emotionally resonant, this is a memorable work.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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
“Of owl songs, grief and love, a must read book of poetry.”
—Poetry Is Not A Luxury
West Portal
University of Utah Press, July 2021
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,
“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
“Here is a primer on the movements of the soul, which will surprise, delight, and offer solace.”
—Christopher Merrill
“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