True Mistakes

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.

As the poet goes about daily life--taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression--she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: ＂I often think about things so hard / I kill them.＂ And: ＂Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?＂ In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.

Working to turn ＂mistakes＂--misperceptions, errors in life and in art--into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers ＂a truth for every reader,＂ writes series editor Patricia Smith.

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.