we don't know we don't know
Winner of the Bakeless Prize
2010
Available now:
“[A] striking first collection. . . . Lantz’s best poems have traditional strengths and narrative surprises: ‘Thinking Makes It So’ records a shockingly callous act, and ‘Of the Parrat and other [birds] that can speake’ (another title from Pliny) reacts to the death of a parent, first with controlled humor, then with grief, and finally with sharpened irony—in a just world, anthologies would snap it up.”—Publishers Weekly
Nick Lantz's poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don't Know We Don't Know is the debut of a wide-ranging, audacious new voice.