Alison Prine

Alison Prine’s latest collection of poems, Loss and Its Antonym (Headmistress Press, 2024), won the 2023 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Points, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and others. She lives and works in Burlington, Vermont.

Loss and Its Antonym

Alison Prine’s spectacular collection, Loss and Its Antonym, sweeps across a lifetime in an attempt to find the right antonym for grief—knowing full well the bittersweet futility of such a project. The only way is through, and through we go: wrestling the devastating loss of the mother in a car accident, which the speaker survived as a child, and other family traumas. Time is the great and ruthless healer of this book, with which the speaker directly converses. While echoes of the past continue to haunt, repair is found in the book’s appreciation for the world: chilly Vermont winters with fresh snow, erotic peonies in season, lush plumages of birds, wounded sugar maples, budding lesbian romances, simple breezes. Here, the poem itself is the only antonym for loss.

—Bianca Stone, author of What Is Otherwise Infinite