We’re excited to share our latest acquisition: The Resurrection of the Body, winner of the 2025 Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry, by Kirk Schlueter.
The Resurrection of the Body explores hunger both within and outside the male body in the American Midwest, tracing the journey of a male speaker suffering from anorexia as he comes of age, navigating the porous line between self-improvement and self-harm. The collection reveals a speaker whose lineage is fraught with disordered eating and the self-sacrifice demanded in Midwestern masculinity. Lyric-narrative poems show him sparring in parking lots to learn boyhood toughness, starving himself in summer, and reflecting on the similarities between his body and the deer he’s hunted for years. Striking imagery and vivid imagination showcase the beauty evident even in a ruined landscape and unhealthy body. Drawing on allusions as diverse as Frankenstein’s Monster, Jessica Simpson’s portrayal of Daisy Duke, and the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s core, this affecting debut delves into an under-reported and under-discussed disorder, asking how we can live with grace inside our most desperate struggles.
Kirk Schlueter received his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and his B.A. from Truman State University. His poetry has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council award and the 2018 Frontier Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in magazines such as Bat City Review, RHINO, Diode, Nimrod, River Styx, Passages North, Grist, Frontier Poetry, Ninth Letter, Natural Bridge, The Pinch, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Connotation Press among others. He lives and teaches in St. Louis and its Illinois suburbs.
The Resurrection of the Body will be published this fall. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!