I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets

Fork Apple Press is honored to publish Alex Baskin's I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets as the winner of The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest (2025).

I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets delves into memory to weave together themes of religion, spirituality, and sexuality. The poems use recollection to reflect and re-examine interpersonal relationships and community systems, and their entanglement with inherited beliefs and rituals. While embracing intimate moments, Baskin mediates empathy and care alongside critique. These poems negotiate cultural knowledge, personal experience, and social calling, centering the speaker's agency in the body. In this way, home, too, is reframed from a definitive, static geography, to a movable, flexible, and shifting presence. To quote the poet himself, "I get to decide where this poem goes / how it moves, what it makes."

Alex Baskin is a hospital chaplain and a poet, rooted in over a decade of Buddhist practice and his upbringing in an orthodox Jewish family and community. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Tufts University and a master's of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Redivider, The Christian Century, poetry.onl, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee, a runner-up for the MoonLit Getaway Poetry Contest, a finalist for the Lucky Jefferson Poetry Prize, and an honorable mention for the Northwind Writing Award. He has an essay in Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a poem in the anthology Ache: The Body's Experience of Religion (Flipped Mitten Press, 2024.) This is his debut chapbook. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Massachusetts.