Sylph: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs, shades, and wilis. Some of these creatures seduced men into dancing until they died punishment for inconstancy or lured them into love. For Cloud, the dark gravity that holds these enchanters to the earth is the same as our own and thus these demons are as everyday as air.

Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike and prismatic. "In the blink the mouse spent to disappear, I loved you," avows the sylph. The cost of her ascension and ours is steep: "our price speech, our forgetting breath." Such are the stakes in this complex, seductive, and stunning debut.