Winner, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
J. Bailey Hutchinson’s
Gut
is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.