Awarded to the best collection, best debut, and best design among books reviewed on Preposition

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Preppies

2025

released on December 17, 2025

Best Collection

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Criminally overlooked for last year's National Book Award longlist, Barot's fifth collection features one of the best responses to the COVID pandemic I have encountered: a long-poem, consisting of thirty sections of prose poems, which brings public and private space into discomfiting relation. In that poem Barot not only zooms in—to the small, the domestic, the inward—but problematizes the ethical consequences of doing so, asking how one might and what it means to privilege romantic love over and against what we might think of as civic engagement. This is a brilliant collection from one of the nation's top poets, and it shows Barot's ability to continuously complicate his poetics from book to book. I am eager for what he does next.

Best Debut

For the fourth time in three years, Changes Press finds its way into the Preppies. Jimin Seo's remarkable debut, OSSIA, is stunning epistolary elegy for his late friend, mentor, and perhaps lover, the poet Richard Howard. There is not only in OSSIA a profound sounding of the depths of despair—“Why do we wake up in the middle of the night,” Seo asks. “What friends / will take my calls […]”—but also ambivalent acknowledgement of how memory and cultural tradition work to allay the obliterations of death. If few young poets can name influences prior to the turn of the twenty-first century, Seo finds both stimulus and solace in those cultural workers who have come before him, including Howard.

Best Design

One should read the book—or at least the review—to get a sense of what Huapaya does in [gamerover] with the space of the page in its relation to the spaces of geography and history. The collection looks like no other book of poetry I have seen, each page a dense matrix of fragmented phrases, tactical white space, isolated single words, and columns of text as legible vertically as horizontally. In this way, the long, layered poems in [gamerover] resemble erasures, but they are in fact highly citational collages drawn from a staggering range of sources. Ultimately, Huapaya develops a profound sequence of cultural maps as extensive as they are deep, using Phoenix and its history as an avatar for the ravages of American capitalism. Through the local, Huapaya goes global, making these poems, as he puts it, “prepositions / of | place” as multi-directional and as provocative as all prepositions.