Kirk Wilson's SONGBOX, winner of the 2020 Trio Award, is the testament of a mature poet confronting the dissolution of American assumptions, the precarious nature of identity, and the alchemical strangeness of experience. In the words of the Swedish poet Malina Mörling, the "profound and affecting poems" in SONGBOX "speak to us in an effortless and immediate syntax." In charged language, the poems dance with time and commune with love, memory, family, and loss. They bear acute witness to the pandemic, the long overdue reckoning with racial injustice, the threat of nascent fascism, the climate crisis. As the beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye has written, "these are poems to return to again and again."
