Ars Poeticas

by Juliana Spahr

The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry

Finalist, 2026 Four Quartets Prize (Poetry Society of America)

Finalist, 2026 California Book Award

Finalist, 2026 Balcones Prize in Poetry

During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song's possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together.


[Sample Poem]

from ARS POETICA 1: CORAL

To write poetry after Castle Bravo.
Then to write poetry after 1500 feet.
After high-quality steel frame buildings
not completely collapsed, except
all panels and roofs blown in.
After 2,000 feet.
After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed
or standing but badly damaged.
After 3,500 feet.
After church buildings completely destroyed.
After brick walls severely cracked.
After 4,400 feet.
After 5,300 feet.
After roof tiles bubbled and melted.
After 6,500 feet.
After mass distortion of large steel buildings.
To write the Cold War and doves.
The Cold War and tapeworms.
The Cold War and sails of ships.
The Cold War and the steel of bridges.
To write poetry after that.
To write in a world with few nutrients,
one that rocks back and forth.
The same beginning in both the sea and the land.
To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton.
And then poetry that knows
the long, stinging tentacles capturing.
Knows the water.
The Atlantic and the Pacific.
The connections between.
The one moving into the other.
To develop poetry in the stomach
that then exits through the mouth
which is the anus.
To write poetry in the blue
that is the absence of green.
Light penetration.
Whorls of tentacles.
The slime earth too.
Hunters and farmers.
Shallow water.
Few nutrients.
High fecundity.
Rapid growth.
Multiarmed morphology and tube feet.
To write tube feet.
To write the exact place.
Seaward slope place.
Sea terrace place.
Algal ridge place.
Coral algal zone place.
Seaward reef flat place.
Islet or interisland reef crest place.
Lagoon reef flat place.
Lagoon terrace place.
Lagoon floor or basin place.
Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place.
To write poetry after.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 4, 2025

About the author

Juliana Spahr (born 1969) is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.

Both Spahr's critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown Spahr's commitment to fostering a "value of reading" as a communal, democratic, open process. Her work therefore "distinguishes itself because she writes poems for which her critical work calls." In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response (1996).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[jane bro]

incredible, gets straight to the point about the absurdity & small joys of poetry without delusion. congratulations juliana spahr.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A poem, I understood, to be a place for the questions, not for the answers. I picked up Brecht to understand how to write all the peace and the war, the order and the chaos, the joy and the despair at the same time. What is a poem, I told myself, if not that magical thing that inventories everything so that the harms and hurts of all our lives are understood in some way. I thought if I just real all of Brecht, I would maybe find the singing. There was a new edition. It was hard to hold because it was so big. I tested it on a pillow, and I rested my head on a pillow, and I turned the pages looking for the singing. I couldn’t find the singing. What I found instead were a series of questions. Brecht did not answer. Turned to Rukeyser. Also did not answer. I thought briefly of that shield made for Achilles. The one where the moon and the sun shine at the same time. The one with the two cities, with the sowing and the reaping. The one that ends with the ocean. And then I went back to twitter and watched a video of the feds that are more or less a militia right now arrest an old man who brought a leaf blower to a protest so as to blow back the endless teargas.”

The Pulitzers were political this year.
Maybe more than usual.

They chose to shine their blinding light on poet and scholar Juliana Spahr’s deeply personal exploration of the dark cave we all find ourselves in.

Ars Poeticas. The art of poetry. What is it for? Can it be useful? Can there be singing in dark times? Brecht’s heavy question lingers in the air all over the pages of this stupendous collection. The poems are taut and precise and filled to the brim with the natural world. Rooted in the muck but lyrical in spirit. Clear-eyed, unapologetic and by their very own existence in the world, dare I say it, hopeful?

From Berkeley’s street protests to the plains where the bisons are no more, Spahr’s words take on all of the opposing attributes of Achilles’ shield.

In her own grappling with the meaning of poetry in times of crisis, she keeps moving, line by line, poem by poem.
And pushes us forward.

[Anthony Conty · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Ars Poeticas” by Juliana Spahr aims to be an “art for art’s sake” poetry collection, and, in interviews, the author says she seeks to explain why we write poems in times of crisis. She pulls off the impossible, writing poems about how difficult it is to write in verse. Not everyone will enjoy it, but you have to admire its skill.

You will need AI and resources to catch all of the vocabulary references and the flora and fauna mentioned in some of the imagery; still, you follow along and expect that the poet’s relationship with nature has a deeper meaning. The works are quick, so if you have a reading goal that you are struggling to meet, here is a quick option to get your brain thinking and analyzing.

Spahr does not waste words, and she loves her vocabulary. I would have no chance at communicating as she does. I think that we all go through a poetry phase and start to realize our own weaknesses. The writer here follows different patterns, rhythms, and meter without missing a beat.

While sneaking a peek at other reviews, I saw several people who listed “Acknowledgments” as their favorite poem, and I thought they were messing with me. Once you see it, you will recognize how a mundane part of a book that many do not read can be powerful, intense, and memorable. Spahr is always a scribe regardless of literary technique.

Look, not everyone will pick this up and turn themselves on to the genre, but I am glad that I make time for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner each year. Spahr took her vocation as a way to explain how the world was changing, suffering, and persevering. Have Google nearby and get your learning on while reading something new.

[(✿◠‿◠) · Rating 5 out of 5]

✨nine trillion stars

fucking H E L L this

book is so good✨

[Mic Jones]

Yup this has just got to become required reading to be here in this variously and increasingly fucked present

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six long poems, beginning and ending with coral, and considering scotch broom, bluebird-ghost, bison, and goby in between,grapple with celebrating the natural world in a time of environmental and political gloom.
Pulitzer prize winner. I really enjoyed reading this, both for the subject matter and the craft. She is appropriately angry and active. And it is heartening to see her come down on the side of producing such nourishing poetry. Sometimes she uses an obvious structure (11 syllables to a line, for example) and sometimes her scaffolding is less obvious. She piles on examples and detail.
e.g.
"Warblers and the northeast flowing
winds ride together down
the river these cool spring
nights. Sugar maples, beech,
and northern red oaks grow
to a largeness, helped by
ferns and fungi. The bobcat and
the woodrat shelter beneath..."

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poem in here is Acknowledgements.

[Leslie Mae · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

“She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.”

Joy Harjo’s lines open Ada Limón’s The Carrying, the collection I read immediately after Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas. But they reached backward into the book I had just finished. Was it poetry I loved and hated? Was it America? Was it poets I loved and hated? They were all the same horses.

I returned Ars Poeticas to the library on the eve of the 2026 midterm elections and told the librarians it felt like exactly the right book to have read tonight. Spahr offers neither a ceremonial declaration about poetry’s power—I had just finished Limón’s rather inane final lecture for the Library of Congress, the institution that sponsored her tenure as Poet Laureate, titled Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry — nor the cleaner consolation of defeat.

She gives us the full amalgam. There is a cold blob forming in the waters near Greenland, waiting to alter the climate. There are mothers with crafted objects attached to their strollers being tear-gassed alongside everyone else, their maternity leave and middle-class lives offering no exemption. Even as they are tear-gassed, they proudly display the little hearts they made while on leave: I craft is their declaration against tyranny. California burns, and the poet closes her windows and gets some work done. She first admits that the work was poetry, then changes it to answering email, as if that were either more defensible or less absurd. At a rally, she can pick up a stick and enter the struggle until it is time to get into the car and take her child to Little League. No scale of the crisis explains all the others, and no part of the poet’s life stands outside it.

Some of these poems positively felt like doomscrolling. One fact calls up another, one ecological system opens into another political history, and atrocity presses against ordinary domestic obligation. But Spahr never allows political awareness to become a flattering account of the person who possesses it. She keeps turning the screen back toward herself.

She does something similar with the natural world. I am susceptible to the exact vocabulary of living things. A poet can take me as far as she likes into those names, and I will follow, mistaking greater precision for greater relation. Spahr knows the seduction. She begins with warblers riding the spring winds, maples and beech growing among ferns and fungi, the bobcat and woodrat sheltering beneath them. She follows tributaries into the river and adds another bird simply for the pleasure of names such as golden-winged, chestnut-sided, and yellow-rumped. Then she catches herself performing beauty and calls the poet a clown—the clown being herself at a 3 pm reading.

Around the river’s curve comes the coal barge, heading toward the power plant. Its smokestack plume settles over the bee balm, wild indigo, wood poppies, bobcat, and woodrat. Spahr sets out the erudite pearls and then rips them from our clutching hands. The lovely catalogue cannot remain evidence of ecological care when everything being named is breathing the same industrial residue.

The bison produces another ironic refusal. The animal may return, but the bison moving across an intact prairie will not be restored through well-intentioned research institutions and rewilding grants from banks and governments. Spahr finally names the change required as the end of capitalism, then immediately recoils from landing a poem on a word so clichéd. But she cannot find a more elegant word that tells the truth. The difficulty of putting the idea into a poem reveals how difficult the culture has made it to imagine outside the system.

I was reminded of what Barry Lopez kept pressing toward: knowing the vocabulary is not the point. The beautifully named world is still being consumed. Exact language may sharpen attention, but it can also let the writer feel that attention has completed its ethical work. Spahr allows herself the pleasure of the ecological catalogue and then refuses to let either poet or reader keep it as proof of care.

That cynical side-eye includes poetry itself. She remembers the large grant and the ways literary legitimacy is distributed. Only some poets are read; others contest the scraps of institutional attention, still others are left with Facebook and Instagram (sorry, not sorry Rupi Kaur). A poem may call itself resistance, but when tear gas enters the crowd, its language provides no material shield. Even the poet who joins the rally remains inside the grant economy, the car, the parenting schedule, the burning landscape, and the email inbox.

And yet Spahr keeps writing. This is what saves the collection from cynicism as another form of self-protection. She does not preserve poetry by declaring that it will save us. She protects poetry by refusing to say that poetry will protect us. Clearly, she’s too smart for all that nonsense. Her directness makes me inclined to agree.

[Konz Socs · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

"A poem / I understood, as a room that could be pried open by possibility. A room in / Vancouver, early days in the twenty-first century, where Jeff Derkson said poetry / is a form of atypical thinking and I wrote it in a notebook then wrote his name beside it. I hold on to this still."
Read for Living Writers

In the span of 7 poems, Juliana Spahr tackles nature, war, destruction, life, death, and the very essence of poetry through seemingly simple but spellbinding prose. I did like it, and while it dealt with heavy topics such as war, it did so with an apt and surprisingly not inappropriate humor. There were a bunch of pop-culture references though that may make it feel outdated in the future (why are we talking about 4chan and fast and furious here?), but the future isn't today, so it hasn't bothered me. I think the first poem was my favorite, with the way the structure and the syntax and the diction all played on with the message and the theme of the work. I see why it's a pulitzer prize winner. I will say though, the way it writes about poetry almost makes it seem like it's trying to win a prize instead of being it's own thing. Like Oscar-bait, but for poetry, if that makes sense. Almost. I'm not sure, y'know? And overall it was an enjoyable experience, and that's all that really matters in the end, right?

[BooksRgood · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! a short book of variable length poems. fantastic.
here's one pasted below with apologies for the line breaks being completely different than Ms. Spahr had them published.

There was once a prairie.
It's never coming back,
as in it will never be whole again.
There's the bison.
They can come back.
But the bison plus the prairie,
as in the bison moving over the prairie with the rumored speed of a race horse, that too is never coming back until we change the well-intentioned hopes of institutions of research, the less well-intentioned grants
for rewilding from banks and governments, into something psychotic and large in its demands,
by which I mean the end of capitalism.
Really, I don't want to land this poem so hard, land it on a word so clichéd as "capitalism," but I don't know how to say otherwise about this predicament we are in where there is only one way out.
That it's an idea that feels impossible to include in a poem tells us something about the new feats of imagining we have yet to embrace.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely collection essaying the challenge and value of writing (and reading?) of poetry during tumultuous times filled with ecological disaster, war, and other devastations of the modern world.

This collection made me think of Adrienne Rich's poem (one of my favorites), which feels a little like a companion piece, "What Kind of Times Are These" particularly the end: so why do I tell you /
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these / to have you listen at all, it's necessary / to talk about trees."

Of many lines and sections I found myself highlighting was this:
And yet / what else are you doing here / besides hoping to find some / sort of instruction manual on / how to refrain this song, / where elk graze beside the strong / oak tree, hunted down, yet / persisting, song, akin to night / heron-ghost and bluebird-ghost, / stuttering to each other, / if only for the desire to/ communicate. Comforting / is a complicated word.

[Liam Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection that, after reading the acknowledgements, was a hodge-podge of different interactions and submission solicitations. The way its organised, however, makes it read like an activist becomes nature through an acquaintance of rhythym. I don't really know how else to put it; and perhaps not even intentional!

Some lines I liked:

"The European tradition, and yet those lines about how poetry is a sort of bread or that one about how it is not a luxury. Perhaps those things are true, but we have treated poetry as if it is not bread, have wrapped it in tissue paper and stuck it in a bag with other luxury goods. To get it back will take a dismantling of everything around it."

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wendell Berry having died this day, I think to say on his behalf, about Spahr's misjudged "Acknowledgements" section . . . that is in verse paragraphs that help her think through her poetics of the secular ecological orders: it's one thing to take one's avocation in poetry seriously, and yes, even Wendell Berry was implicated in this crisis bordering on compulsion; it's another thing to suppose not even your book's political community will spare you for the book's acknowledgements -- and for evidence of that, I adduce Berry and his wife Tanya's Port Royal cottage industry across decades.

[Laura Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the Maggie Queeney September Poetry Book Club selection, and it is also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. All poems are Ars Poetica; even the acknowledgments are listed as an Ars Poetica poem in the Table of Contents.

The poems are intimate and look closely at violence and man's impact on nature, on flora, on fauna, on the world. The poet chooses the words used carefully - with love and despair - trying to explain the purpose of poets and poetry in a turbulent world.

[Jonathan Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the naturalistic stream of consciousness poetry a lot, but there was a lot of close repetition. I know the word repetition was purposeful, especially in the final poem, but in some of them, it didn’t land for me.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

My third go around with this book. Still don't like it. Why? Too high brow for me, perhaps? Not fun or snarky enough? Irrelevant! But it won a Pulitzer! Pulitzer-shmulitzer. I can't specify beyond saying poetry either speaks to me, or it doesn't.

[Mandy E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Juliana, why is it that only a poem can properly interrogate poetry? In this rupture, even sticks are irrelevant.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though good, I didn't find much special about it until the Acknowledgements.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Americana: bison, Whitmanesque, invites new path for poetry

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

They were everywhere, as one might say about poetry.

[Jenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

Won the prize for its political relevance—language, form, experimentation are all lackluster and underwhelming. Disappointed and even the ideas it raised lacks depth.

[Alicia Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even her acknowledgments section was a beautiful poem. Thoughtful, timely, sparse, expansive -

[Don Conway-Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wondrous poetry of resistance, worthy of the Pulitzer.

[Jane Hammons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant beautiful writing--just stunning.

[Jacob Schepers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Environment, politics, fa and antifa, poems and the failures and disappointments of poems. Essential reading.

[Annie · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

At first I didn't like it but then I loved it

[catarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

yeah

[Jonathan Ramos aka Dirrty Stacks · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 3.95

[wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brief but significant collection of poetry analyzing the nature of poetry itself. I love the way she plays with structure and pace in her work. I was taken by her "bison theme" to a couple of her works. Across the board Spahr draws inspiration from the natural world. I love to reread this book and find valuable new things each time. Poeticas deserves all the acclaim that it has received.

[Coco Keehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a time of ecological and political crises, what does poetry have to do with anything? This lyrical book of poetry and prose sets out to answer “is this not an art of what matters?”

I loved this book of poetry a lot