Dissent

Winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, selected by Michael PriorDissent, the third book of poems by Austin Allen, explores division, resistance, and exile in a variety of settings, from nineteenth-century New England to distant solar systems. Here readers will find snapshots of warring planets and pandemic-era France, revelations from government servers and Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls, and a testimonial from a fringe religious sect in the New Mexico desert.The poems capture the dignity of eccentricity and the uncertainties of protest (“I speak out. I feel that I must. / I hear my own spiel with disgust”). Featured along the way are many lively dissenters and outsiders: Yoko Ono, a reclusive mathematician, a brain in a jar. Futuristic scenarios mingle with personal elegies and love lyrics-efforts to preserve bonds and memories threatened by an age of schisms.Avoiding allegiance to any one school or style, the collection serves up apocalyptic limericks, a “high-octane blockbuster sonnet,” a catalog of items cleared out of a parent’s home, and instruction pieces in the style of Ono’s Grapefruit. Whether depicting a visionary mailman or happy thieves on Christmas, Dissent probes the unorthodox corners of a world where poetry itself can feel heretical.