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Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
The University of Wisconsin Press
November 7, 2023

Praise:

“Michael Dhyne tells us he was born the day that his mother told him his father had died, and it’s true; in this spare, hard-won collection, even those poems that aren’t elegiac are elegies, since their speaker inhabits that originating loss—a wound which is also something very close to the source of love. Scrupulously honest, relentless and tender, this is a remarkable first book.” – Mark Doty

“Afterlife is heartbreaking and brilliant in its delicacy and its depths, and in the many ways it reaches from interior drama to range far out into the wider world. These poems carry the powerful and particular effects of a singular experience of early loss, even while they look intently at the changes that follow, and the possibilities they contain for understanding how to continue forward. The spell cast by this book ties our adult ways of moving through our lives to the primitive child-need for magic and reassurance: the longing we all know for order amid the terrors of random events, and the search, in the welter of our days, for the place or person or state of mind in which self can feel held.” – Debra Nystrom

“Singing his way back into a childhood devastated by the violent, accidental death of his father, the poet channels the voices of all the victims: his mother, his father, and himself. In poem after poem, Dhyne creates that urgent space only the best poets can—a space of anguished compassion where the dead and living gather to haunt and inspirit each other’s being.” – Gregory Orr