Ping Pong Free Press and the Henry Miller Memorial Library are proud to announce the winner of our annual poetry contest: Dylan Krieger for her collection no ledge left to love.

Brian Henry chose her manuscript out of a field of outstanding submissions. The top three finalists for the contest are: Mark Lamoureux for Horologian; V Jacob Adams for Past Lives; and Megan Leonard for What Queen What Binary Star.

Brian Henry’s Citation:

Dylan Krieger’s no ledge left to love is a book of delirious delights. Cutting across time(s) to fashion a visceral, necessarily disturbing tour of thought experiments and philosophical constructs, Krieger writes with an audacious yet sobering energy. Rife with vertiginous wordplay and transgressive intent, these are poems “for the savagesphere or wherever next we might emerge after a thousand years cocooning in our eyelashes and sticky furs.”

About Dylan Krieger:

Regarding the creation of her book Krieger writes, “As the titles in its contents suggest, “no ledge left to love” is a poetry project that reimagines and challenges the frameworks of Western philosophical thought experiments, especially with respect to gender categories, moral certitude, and diachronic identity.

Each poem focuses on a different thought experiment in analytical philosophy, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Nagel’s spider in a urinal. Recognizing that Western philosophy—like most all academic disciplines—has been largely dominated by wealthy straight white men, “no ledge” attempts to dismantle the reductive binaries and disembodied logic of the analytical philosophical vernacular, emphasizing instead the robust physicality and potent mutability of the bodies required to convey its lofty ideas.”

Dylan Krieger is a genderqueer feminist who currently works as a trade magazine editor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she earned her MFA in creative writing at LSU and twice directed the annual Delta Mouth Literary Festival.

Before studying with Lara Glenum and Laura Mullen at LSU, she lived in northern Indiana for the bulk of her young life and studied poetry with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson at Notre Dame. Her first book of poems, “Giving Godhead,” was released earlier this year by Delete Press and received an glowing review in the New York Times Book Review on August 6, 2017.

About no ledge left to love

Dylan Krieger is a philosopher, there is no doubt about that, and with a typical philosopher’s bravado she takes an analytical exacto knife to the problems of our world. What does she find? Crony capitalism and systems of oppression and dominance instituted by heterosexual upper class white males in order to keep their hegemony on power.

She speaks to us as the voice of the zeitgeist of America, a Greek chorus we have ignored for far too long. And the Greek influence is subtly present, almost undetectable. The metric and rhyme scheme she makes use of will remind readers of the epic poems of old.

And this is a new epic poem– not only because it makes deft use of rhyme and pattern–see quantum immortality–but because it traces the heroine’s journey from darkness into an even greater darkness. The Odyssey is the story of the last hero from the Greek age of Heroes, no ledge left to love is the story of humanity’s last age. Imbued with philosophical concepts and wit–Krieger’s tour de force is a trumpet call, but only for those who will hearken to it. Now the question is, will you?

–River Atwood Tabor