Series Editor: Claudia Keelan (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
The Test Site Poetry Series is a collaboration between University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Black Mountain Institute, Witness and The Believer, and the University of Nevada Press. Each year, the series editor along with an advisory board, which includes Sherwin Bitsui, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Ronaldo Wilson, will select a winner and a runner-up. The selected winners will be published by the University of Nevada Press as part of this series.
Winning books engage the perilous conditions of life in the twenty-first century, as they pertain to issues of social justice and the earth. They demonstrate an ethos that considers the human condition in inclusive love and sympathy, while offering the same in consideration with the earth.
2022 Test Site Poetry Prize winner In poems both personal and historical, The Dove of the Morning News explores conceptions of collectivity, inflected by each psyche, as a force of both connection...
2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental...
The collection of poems in The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam circles the U.S. Civil War and the failed revolution of Reconstruction, and Matthew Moore makes incursions into the histories and...
Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness,...
In her debut collection, Stephanie Berger cracks the earth open and exposes the “woman inside.” In a sequence of poems that present variations on the Western feminine archetype, Interior Femme visits many unique locales, from cemeteries in Brooklyn to canyons in New Mexico to churches in San Diego, Paris, and Peru. Berger approaches her subjects—mothers, goddesses, whores, daughters, muses, and movie stars—from multiple angles, and through her poems she reveals historical, personal, social, environmental, and artistic viewpoints.
With fearless and playful language, Katherine Factor’s debut collection reveals agony, humor, and the necessary voices of the female oracle through time. The oracle’s message is apparent—she is not dead. Her words are cryptic but contemporary, offering caution along with guidance to a society interested only in using prophecy for profit. In a time when only a select few are prosperous, A Sybil Society paints a portrait of the present moment and unveils a restless truth. The collection is fearless in the face of convention and gives readers a sense of devastating sorrow in a world gone mad.
Wry, compassionate, and deftly observed, the poems in The Mouth of Earth contemplate how we might live wisely in the midst of a planetary change we barely comprehend. This vivid, compelling book is a powerful contribution to environmental literature of the 21st century, and a survival guide for those seeking connection to our planet and one another in the age of climate crisis.
Riddle Field tackles the complex process of self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound sexual trauma by avoiding many of the most direct ways of commenting on it. In interweaving the voices of an entire fictional town that is about to be changed forever by the destruction of a dam, the poems highlight the environment, both human and natural, that sexual trauma is born from, and calls to attention the many ways in which we create intimacy and distance when our trauma is kept secret.
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change.
