Rise and Float: Poems (Jake Adam York Prize)

Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working―remarkably, miraculously―to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page.

With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide―all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release.

The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate―hope, however difficult it may be.

Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, which was selected by Randall Mann as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. His poetry and prose have appeared in or are forthcoming in the Paris Review, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, the Adroit Journal, and others. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2018 George Bogin Memorial Award. He grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in Oakland, where he teaches poetry at The Writing Salon.