The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that Casey Thayer has been named a finalist for the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize by series editor Patricia Smith. His manuscript Rational Anthem will be published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series in the spring of 2022. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press Miller Williams.
“Casey Thayer’s Rational Anthem tangles with the multifisted specter of masculinity,” said Patricia Smith, “yet it veers into tenderness and insight with a deftness that startles. At its heart, this is a book of men and their myriad levels of madness, their embrace of violence, their determined but sometimes misguided meanderings toward love.”
Patricia Smith also named as a finalist for the prize Michael Mlekoday for their manuscript All Earthly Bodies. She chose as winner of the prize J. Bailey Hutchinson for her manuscript Gut.
In a voice at times electrified by caustic cynicism, at others stripped bare by grief, Casey Thayer’s Rational Anthem sings its sardonic tribute to a country “wracked with debt and credit collectors,” a country where “if it’s brown, it’s down,” a country where children hug textbooks to their chests to protect against a bullet and parents layaway Kevlar backpacks. In this country, a boy can be swallowed by the whale of expectation. He can resist by lighting a fire in its belly, or he can comply with his consumption by remaining underwater. The book’s closer, a mash-up of active-shooter trainings attended by the author, attempts to outline a strategy for surviving such a world but only arrives at more questions. Formally inventive, lyrically dense, Thayer asks us why we find it so hard to change the stories we keep repeating.
Casey Thayer is the author of Self Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur and Love for the Gun, winner of the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Recipient of fellowships from Stanford University and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, his work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.