Long Rules: An Essay in Verse (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry)

A book-length poem in six sections, Long Rules takes readers to five Trappist monasteries in the southeastern United States to consider the intersections of solitude, family, music, and landscape. Its lines unspool in a loose and echoing blank verse that investigates monastic rules, sunlight, Saint Basil, turnips, Thomas Merton, saddle-backed caterpillars, John Prine, fatherhood, and everything in between. Looking inside and outside the self, Perry asks, what, or whom, are we serving? Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, this essay in verse contemplates the meaning of solitude and its contemporary ramifications in a time of uncertainty.

Nathaniel Perry is the author of Nine Acres, winner of the American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize. He teaches at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he edits the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.