[02/16/27] Childers, Christopher: Bitters

The Waywiser Press, paperback

Publication Date: February 16, 2027

Publisher Marketing: 

Winner of the Twenty-first Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

with a foreword by the judge, A. E. Stallings

In Bitters, Christopher Childers hosts a poetic cocktail party for the not-quite defeated. A noted translator of the classics, Childers applies his classical sensibility to postmodern life as he reflects ruefully on childhood, celebrates love in middle age, embraces the thorns of friendship, and bids his father goodbye. Touching such topics as napkin folding, myofascial release, mixology, the pandemic, and murdering Fa(u)lkners, these clear-eyed and soulful poems marshal natural phrasing and rich formal control as they reckon with love, loss, and the strangeness of having a self.