Award Winners
William Carlos Williams Award - 2025
Philip Metres
Tweets to Iskandar from the Capitol, One Hundred Years After His Death
1.
Great-grandfather,
I wish you could see
this land your children’s
children now wander—
how from three directions
you can’t even perceive
the palace of the emperor
for the leaf-lush trees.
2.
The dredged reflecting pool
looks roughly like the flesh
beneath my ruptured nail.
The stone tower unleashes
and roots down its double.
If you could see my face
would you see your face
hovering back like a skull?
3.
This is the stone and water
for the millions who died
fighting in a war called good.
Your son warred a war
before and after the war
against everyone who didn’t die.
For my empire, should I
object or volunteer?
4.
The war no one won
almost drowned
my father your grandson
in its black stone.
He carries the stone
hidden in his spine—
and all the names
he couldn’t save.
5.
When they came for you
and brandished their guns
in your store in Salina Cruz—
you could not imagine
El Norte any more
than I imagine I hear
you plead in two tongues
to spare your children.
6.
Are you the secret reason
my father’s at home
speaking any tongue
of all the migrant people
he welcomes as kin?
He holds the umbilical
passage to the homeland
beneath his olive skin.
7.
In the heart of empire
I swallow my sword
and exhale a great fire,
hollow out my words
until they can float
you over the stolen river.
My heart and its borders
swarm with migrant hope.
Reprinted from Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) with the permission of the poet.
David Baker on Philip Metres’s Fugitive/Refuge
Prayer, protest, and passport, Philip Metres’s superb collection Fugitive/Refuge activates these and many other forms of language to trace the history of his Lebanese great-grandfather, Iskandar, and the branching presence of Metres’s immigrant family in America. This multivocal work richly blends the power of a choral ode with Metres’s own guiding lyric presence; he shows himself as imminently capable of singing as of charting the harrowing journeys to residence, citizenship, and remembrance.
Metres has written previously about the value of documentary and investigative poetics. Fugitive/Refuge displays the additive power of these tactics; using the qasida as his formal basis, Metres weaves into this ancient lyric genre photographs, immigration documents, Arabic-language passages, and much more, to establish the fact, as well as the effects, of the family’s presence. Here are poems in columns, in rhymed quatrains, tumbling prose, in erasure and dialogue, including a few that read, as in Arabic, from right to left. What most binds this outstanding book is Metres’s virtuoso skill as a lyric poet—he is both soloist and conductor—where wordplay and wit are matched by the depth of a sorrowful psalm.
Fugitive/Refuge is a vital, ancient story intensified anew by our perilous political moment in America—a nation proud of itself but confused by its vision, as afraid of itself as of so many “others,” capable of hatred, injustice, but also of healing and the hope of reparative song. It’s an experiment as rich and vexed as the nation. Everything must fit, or nothing belongs.
Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (2024), Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening (2018), and Sand Opera (2015). His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has received the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA.