The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Architect by Alison Thumel, winner of the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.
“When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,” writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these rooms—the same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wright’s Prairie Style buildings—shapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: “For years after my brother’s death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths—boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn’t know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.”
Architect is an “ingenious and heart-rending elegy,” writes series editor Patricia Smith. “Alison Thumel builds and rebuilds her lost brother; she mourns, examines, resurrects and loses him again and again, each time craving to find a body for him that might last. Although the grief in Architect may seem measured—locked in the poet’s tight but surprising approach to lyric—it is a take on grieving that’s wide-aloud, both contained and unleashed, resounding, and unforgettable.”
Alison Thumel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA.
Architect will be published in the Spring of 2024.