If All the World and Love Were Young

In Stephen Sexton’s remarkable debut, the video games of his childhood are once again a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, Sexton charts the familiar levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world-- and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. This moving, otherworldly narrative is a daring exploration of memory, grief, and the necessity of the unreal.

Stephen Sexton’s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.