Book of Potions

Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.

Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.

By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

Lauren K. Watel is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. Book of Potions, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books, is her first book. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. Her work has also won awards from Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation and Mississippi Review. Her prose poem honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was set to music by Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and the piece premiered at the Dallas Symphony. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, she lives in Decatur, Georgia.