Arguments: Poems

Winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, Arguments is an innovative collection that explores inner conflict, ethical action and the eroding ties between self, family, community and the land.

In “Anima Hominis,” Yeats writes, “We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Arguments by Benjamin Gucciardi takes that inner quarrel as its starting point. Written in a time of environmental collapse and social unrest, these poems confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life: how to make a self, a family and an ethical life within exploitative systems that demand complicity. Moving through domestic spaces, a climate activist camp, and landscapes of the American West, the collection blends lyric and formal poems to ask urgent questions: What responsibilities to we bear to one another? How are we entangled in the systems we seek to dismantle? What place does violent resistance hold? How do we sustain an inner life in a material-driven world―and how, in the face of grief, do we balance private mourning with collective obligation? Arguments turns to language as a practice of care, tending the fragile links between self and community, human and non-human, the living and the dead.

Originally from San Francisco, California, Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of Arguments, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and West Portal, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage, chosen by Elena Passarello as the winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost. His poems appear in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY and elsewhere, and have been featured in On Being’s "Poetry Unbound," Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He has received the James Dickey Poetry Prize from Five Points, the Booth Prize for Unexpected Literature and the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate, as well as awards from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Jentel Foundation, PLAYA and Artsmith. In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.