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Winner of the Dorset Prize for Poetry
Lightboxes is an aptly named collection of mostly square (don’t be fooled by the word) paragraph containers of heightened language that illuminate works of visual art, the lives and world that are their source, and the acute consciousness examining them. Each “lightbox” exhibits the writer’s associative freedom into revelations about her own life while sharpening perception of a challenging work by a visual artist--most of them modern or contemporary, and yes, all 47 artists are women, and otherwise, entirely unclassifiable. And while that last word hangs in the air, it hovers over my sense of Lightboxes’ brilliance of style–– its refusal to settle, its nimble ironic wit, its exhilarating candor, the way it investigates an artist’s life and times through her art, the way it empowers a willingness to reveal us to ourselves (“…certainty. There is a way to wrap yourself in it so nobody sees the questions they aren’t asking.” ) So, too, her audacious refusal to fear insight, no matter the breakage; to keep looking until attention creates affinity: “eventually, i pass her enough times that the missing girl on the flyers outside starts to seem like family…” This speaker, this lower case i with her searching mind, makes art’s mute, provocative imagery an invitation to a verbally, historically rich personal act of responsive and subversive creation. Ekphrastic poetry’s exciting collaboration also includes the reader, who, along with the lightbox poems, has access to their initiating images in the online browser’s museum without walls, one lightbox illuminating the other. And at the end, the box on the page breaks into long, separate lines as the culminating poem mimes its entrance into Cecilia Vicuña’s “Quipu Womb,” a work that has the viewer standing in a huge, hanging set of red thread lines, heavy and knotted, enveloped in “the story of women—the minute you enter, blood overwhelms you…” So it is with this collection, each lightbox like a quipu on life’s bloodlines, poetry’s lifelines, clotted and knotted with truth, freed of finality in an open mind: “the story of red thread is a long one—you can stand in the middle of it and not see either end…”
—Eleanor Wilner, Judge of the Dorset Prize for Poetry
About the Author
Rochelle Hurt is a queer poet and creative nonfiction writer from the Ohio rust belt. She is the author of the poetry collections Lightboxes, which won the 2025 Dorset Prize (forthcoming from Tupelo Press); The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022); In Which I Play the Runaway, which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014); as well as Book of Non (Broadstone Books, 2023), a collaboration with Carol Guess. Her work has been included in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as journals like Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. She's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She lives in Knoxville and teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee.
Format: Paperback
Published: March 2027
ISBN: 9781961209831
Advanced Praise
“there’s always a painting beneath the painting—the one we’re afraid of” writes Rochelle Hurt in her brilliantly conceived collection Lightboxes, ekphrastic engagements with women artists. She continues, “sometimes you become the person you’ve fashioned for the world, and when you take the outfit off, there’s nobody underneath” Like a palette knife sharpened with use, Hurt contours and reveals what is lost, hidden, or ravaged from a woman’s life. Not through but alongside the artists whose work she summons, Hurt holds the head of Holofernes in her hands again for all of us. I am terrified and fortified by this book, and I am in awe of its maker. —Kathy Fagan, The Unbecoming