Architect, Alison Thumel’s debut collection and winner of the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, has been reviewed by Grace Li in The Adroit Journal.
“Alison Thumel’s debut poetry collection Architect, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a work that builds and rebuilds with clear mathematical precision, a devastating record of how words function in the wake of loss. Architect presents poetry as process, poetry as revision itself, through a mind at work—a mind of generous intellect and innovation, but also a mind working through incomparable grief. … Thumel’s poetry works line by line, room by room, to lay bare the skeleton of grief’s structure—the blueprints, the fixed beams, the absence at the center, not to recover what has been lost, but to reclaim the unbroken truth of love that stands amidst the wreckage.”
“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.”
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.