Norma Farber First Book Award - 2025

Phillip B. Williams on Jimin Seo’s OSSIA

Jimin Seo's OSSIA collects alternative passages from the same reality and, without preference, makes them coexist in language both bare and baroque, controlled and dismissive of control. Where one reader may find romance, another may find grief; both would be correct. Richard, the friend and muse; the motherlike figure who obsesses over the power and therein the failures of Venus and the divine; the horizontal, untranslated Korean that transcends and embraces title, interlude, interruption, footnote, poem, alternate take, aphorism, exclamation, quotation, song lyric (I believe there is a nod to singer/songwriter Lang Lee on page 69), fable, estuary: all collaborate into a master(less)class of what language cannot say, yet must, thus transforming the saying.

My language is a worry
the world can’t convince
me I'm right.

I'm a man who hugs
head-cocked
into an abacus. I kiss

the dirt with my knees[...]

This is what I've been waiting for from poetry. Something new, daring, doubtful, and utterly against the grain.

Jimin Seo was born in Seoul and immigrated to the United States at the age of eight. His books include OSSIA (2024), winner of the Changes Book Prize, and the chapbook A – 1982 (MF Editions). His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H.Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina’s Outdoor Room pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

FINALISTS

Omotara James is the author of the debut poetry collection Song of My Softening (Alice James Books, 2024), finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Nossrat Yassini Award and The Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and The Washington Post. Her work has received support from the Poetry Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lambda Literary and African Poetry Book Fund. Her poetry appears in various journals and anthologies, including the most recent edition of Best American Poetry. James will serve as Guest Editor of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day in June 2025. She writes, teaches, and edits poetry in New York City.

Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut collection of poetry, Querida, was selected by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz as a recipient for the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Chapbook Fellowship. He received his PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine. His work has also appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Boston Review, Public Books, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.

Alison Thumel’s debut poetry collection, Architect, won the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Kate Tufts Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA. Her poems have appeared widely, including in Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review. She lives and writes in Wisconsin.