The Believer Book Awards Go to Trisha Low and Deborah Landau

The Believer has announced the 2019 winners of The Believer Book Awards, and poet and writer Trisha Low has won in the nonfiction category for Socialist Realism (Coffee House, 2019)! "Few works of art," they write, "outside of the scene at the end of The Wiz where Diana Ross sings 'Home,' swiveling her head wildly, her tearfilled eyes blinking against a black backdrop—offer as scintillating a vision of what it means to yearn for the comfort of home alongside the utter strangeness and sparkle of irresolution." Deborah Landau took home the prize in poetry, for Soft Targets (Copper Canyon), about which the editors write:

In her latest collection, Deborah Landau writes lush, sensual lyrics to reconcile both the beauty and the unrelenting vulnerability of the body, “the soft target.” The poems trace patterns of violence—global and local, past and present—to convey the constant threat of destruction that looms over so many “softs” in our precarious present. All the while, the poems grapple with what it means to live with pleasure and tenderness amid the shadow of imminent doom. As she writes, “O you who want to slaughter us, / we’ll be dead soon enough, what’s the rush— / and this our only world.”

The finalists in poetry are Cameron Awkward-Rich, Christopher Kondrich, Steve Healey, and Franny Choi. Read more about their books, and see all of the winners, here.