Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and selected by judge Dana Levin, Public Abstract is an intricate debut that examines illness and recovery, addiction and loss.
Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Jane Huffman’s intricate debut collection, Public Abstract, examines illness and recovery, loss and addiction: the ripples of influence an addict has on their family circle, and vice versa. We watch as a private mind, devoted to its privacy, is laid out on the page and abstracted to become a public revelation. Building an aesthetic of compressed interiority, the speaker’s tension is clear—“From one lung, I tell the truth. / From the other lung, I lie.” Through intimate and meticulous poems, Public Abstract explores the operations of form, sewn together, and the failings of form, ripped apart. Crumbling under its own weight and folderol, form becomes an act of invention and in Huffman’s expert hands, revision becomes a genre.
Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize
Chosen by Dana Levin from 800 entries
Introduction by Dana Levin
Jane Huffman is the Editor in Chief of Guesthouse literary journal
Jane Huffman was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation
