Winner of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement
Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man. Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age—endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change—exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against anthropocene, to “make lines/against a void.” Here poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrastic, epistle and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence. Repeatedly we find cause for praise. Spring/
ISBN: 9781556597145
Format: Hardcover
Reviews
Winner of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement
“With a mystic’s sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, Sze joins disparate realities with . . . poetic bonds of sight and being.”—Charles Rammelkamp, London Grip
“The observant and electric Into the Hush by Arthur Sze views any environment, natural or made, as dynamic. A work that acknowledges all the poems that came before to make it possible, the accomplished poet indicates how a narrow field of poetry may offer a wider and deeper view.”—Poetry Northwest, Favorites Spring 2025
“Into the Hush, Arthur Sze’s first collection since The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), is another reminder that he deserves the lifetime achievements he’s been winning on a yearly basis—and a reminder that a lifetime is only one timescale encompassed by Sze’s dimension-bending poems. ‘Anvil,’ the book’s one-sentence opener, superimposes moments and millennia, stacking up seventeen clauses starting with ‘when’: ‘When a black butterfly flits past, // when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees, // when you smell the sprig of sunrise and walk up to the ditch, // when Bering Aleut, Juma, Tuscarora join the list of vanished languages . . . ‘ Time’s top-heavy weight, Sze’s last line reveals, is all raw material for the shaping: ‘here is the anvil on which to hammer your days—.’ Twelve collections in, Sze is still checking off new forms (zuihitsu, haibun, pantoum), and still devising novel ways to compact global English to lyric proportions. One poem begins with the chemical equation for photosynthesis; another lets an eraser speak, and hush up: ‘when you look at th q ck br wn f x j mp d v r th l zy d g and find I’ve lifted all the vowels loss quickens the world.'”—Christopher Spaide, Lit Hub