The Poetry Society of Virginia is pleased to announce the Winner of the 2025 PSV North American Poetry Book Award Apocryphal Genesis by Travis Mossotti (Saturnalia Books).
Travis Mossotti- Saturnalia Books
Travis Mossotti, winner of the 2025 North American Poetry Book Award for his collection Apocryphal Genesis (Saturnalia Press), is the author of several award-winning works, including About the Dead, Field Study, Narcissus Americana, and Racecar Jesus. He has been the recipient of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and the May Swenson Book Award, among other commendations. He serves as a Biodiversity Fellow for the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. He lives and works in St. Louis.
Thomas Gardner, Professor Emeritus, Virginia Tech, this year’s PSV North American Poetry Book Award final judge, praised Mossotti’s work as follows:
“Apocryphal Genesis is an act of witness, committed to peering through the mists of time and dailiness and bringing back into speech the invisible and forgotten. It’s a book “shin[ing] lights / on daily happenings of negligible / import,” convinced, and seeking to convince us, that this is where the sacred resides and where the cosmos holds its secrets. “Only invisible things are worth weeping for” it tells us, fighting to bring the world back into focus by uncovering old wounds and singing its way back into “the anger of the discarded” or “the rougher art” of our daily attempts to make meaning and perhaps, for a moment, if only a moment, “hang / an image upon the dining room wall / where before there was nothing, until now.” Its way is the way of meandering, as if what matters and what must be said can only be discovered in the saying, the poet’s deep faith in the everyday and ordinary supported by an equally deep faith in language’s ability to take us there. “We need not depart with an arrival in mind / as we sift our way through language,” Mossotti writes, sure that in time, in the writing, it will be morning again, “each step forward / [having] brought the world that much more into focus.” This is an exquisite, soaring book, catching thought on the fly, tasting it on the tongue before it “dissolves like sugar into batter” or standing back as it shatters in the air and reforms.”
The judge also selected the following books as First and Second Finalists, with the accompanying comments:
First Finalist: In Another Country by Andrea Jurjević (Saturnalia Books)
Andrea Jurjević – Saturnalia Books
“These are poems, Jurjević writes, unfolding the space “between song and suffering [where] there is only nimble weather, bodies wet / with meaning.” And how powerfully the body speaks here, hungry, displaced, aroused, a palimpsest of tracings and visions and scars. If history’s unspeakable weight cannot be fully spoken, then, these poems insist, “what we keep unsaid we taste on our tongues,” in a language of the dark, “wet and light-absorbing,” making out of silence “a wild wasting,” a “gnawing for more,” “a stillsong” vividly present, winding its way through poem after poem.”
Second Finalist: Cauterized by Laura Apol (Michigan State University Press)
Book Details – Michigan State University
“Indeed, these poems are cauterized, “seared,” Laura Apol writes, by the death of a daughter, by “the grief / of a heart that once grew inside me, her / breaking.” Unsettled, self-lacerating—“Why didn’t she tell me?,” one poem asks; “Are you happy now? / See what you made me do?” laments another—these poems refuse consolation, refuse silence, refuse to be mended. And yet somehow, in that grief, out a language simultaneously wounded and tender, they teach us to make, with her, “a home for them,” for all of our losses.”
We are pleased to recognize the following four semifinalists, in alphabetical order (by author), as well:
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass (Perugia Press)
Inheritance with a High Error Rate by Jen Karetnick (Cider Press)
The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick (Madville Publishing)
Four Fields by Dorinda Wegener (Trio House Press)
Our profound thanks to this year’s final judge, Thomas Gardner, and to our devoted preliminary judges. Our deep gratitude as well to all the authors and publishers who entered this year’s competition, providing the judges with many hours of reading pleasure and the unenviable task of having to select only one book as First Place winner from among many excellent works.
Sofia M. Starnes
Chair, 2025 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award
Poetry Society of Virginia 