Blue Loop

AJ WHITEis a poet and educator from north Georgia. He is the winner of the 2023 Fugue Poetry Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and of a 2023 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Tara Betts. His poems have also appeared in The Account, Best New Poets, Overheard, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and lives in New York.

In this searing debut, language loops back and forth across chasm and current to both rescind and remake a present in collision with a future that it does not recognize in its constant approach. Braiding words across histories and memory and space and time, White pulls the present closer to examine the speaker’s place within it, as well as the concrete details that make life events concerning addiction, recovery, and loss possible. In elegantly crafted poems that are both startling and arresting, White’s collection deftly emulates the structural integrity of a star’s blue loop, while mimicking its instability as it evolves. As such, Blue Loop makes space for transformation: through language, in a life, and in the reader. It asks one to enter the experiences of these poems and leave them not just changed but rearranged by all that has ‘been abandoned / into this life’ that is there yet not there, gone yet not gone. It is a graceful, surprising book that I will return to again and again.