In Alison Prine’s stunning new collection, Loss and Its Antonym, we are asked to enter loss’s gravitational pull—losses that could pin a person to a house unhinged. However, Prine provides the buoyancy, the antonym to loss via the beauty of her language—the music, the dazzling precision and command of line, image, tone, voice, and finally her ability to confront the sorrow and grab hold of that rope thrown into the water. This is a book that acknowledges what threatens us—but ultimately celebrates what saves us.
— Carol Potter, author of What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess
With profound clarity and a mesmerizing display of patience, Alison Prine calls upon loss to forsake its stillness within her second collection, Loss and Its Antonym. Her work consistently delivers the swiftest and most surprising brushstroke of poignant agony.
— Vi Khi Nao, author of War Is Not My Mother
Alison Prine’s spectacular collection, Loss and Its Antonym, sweeps across a lifetime in an attempt to find the right antonym for grief— knowing full-well the bittersweet futility of such a project. The only way is through, and through we go: wrestling family traumas, and the devastating loss of the mother in a car accident, which the speaker survived as a child. Time is the great and ruthless healer of this book, with which the speaker directly converses. While echoes of the past continue to haunt, repair is found in the book’s appreciation for the world: chilly Vermont winters with fresh snow, erotic peonies in season, lush plumages of birds, wounded sugar maples, budding lesbian romances, simple breezes. Here, the poem itself is the only antonym for loss.
— Bianca Stone, author of What Is Otherwise Infinite
“Loss and Its Antonym, winner of Sappho’s Prize in Poetry, is a sweet testament to love and to the grief that always threatens to overwhelm us, the pendulum swing between evanescence and permanence at the heart of our sense of purpose.” Charles Rammelkamp’s review in The London Grip
“The title of Prine’s second poetry collection has a tender erudition, with its suggestion that the contents might offer an alternative to sorrow…What could be the opposite of losses so severe? One answer is a certain kind of abundance, which Prine summons not extravagantly or elaborately but with lines that give off a quietly evanescent glow. Jim Schley’s review in Seven Days
“There is something astounding about how she balances such weight, from lines that seem, at times, almost weightless to the depths of such losses…something astounding, as well, in how Prine balances between those weights, while still composing a collection of poems about emerging out the other side from those losses.”Rob McClennan’s review
“Prine brings us poems of humanity laid bare and vulnerable in the aftermath of death. She has a strong connection to emotion, the image, and the world.” Danielle Hansen’s review
Alison Prine 