New Measure Poetry Prize Winner 2024

Lewis Meyers, Satan Flaneur [Selected by Jon Thompson]

As the title suggests, this collection features keen observation of the gratifications and troubles of human life as well as its many ambiguities. Adopting tones ranging across delight, perplexity, and anguish, Satan Flaneur’s observer of contemporary life looks upon our world with gimlet eyes – sometimes jocular, sometimes acerbic, never descending to meanness or untruthfulness. This latter-day flaneur could be you if you occasionally find yourself shaking your head in wonder or dismay when scrutinizing our world. Lewis Meyers (1934–2020) was a member of the English Department at Hunter College and published poems in the Paris Review, Field, and other journals.

Free Verse Editions 2025

Jean Gallagher, Rivermouth Shouting

Rivermouth Shouting, the fourth collection by award-winning poet Jean Gallagher, explores the impermanent and permeable nature of embodiment. Drawing on Genesis, Homer, and the thirteenth-century Mountains and Waters Sutra, these poems trace the making and unmaking of bounded selves: “all,” as a speaker in one of these poems notes, “water speaking of water.” Winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and the FIELD Poetry Prize, Gallagher lives in New York City and teaches at NYU. 

Tracy Zeman, Interglacial

As humanity reshapes geological time in the present, our origins are still legible in the glaciated landscapes of the Great Lakes. In lyric language spliced with borrowed text and single-sharp moments, Tracy Zeman’s Interglacial connects a changing region to our deep-past and near-future. Of bird, rock, and lake, this travelogue catalogues species and places both extinct and extant. Zeman’s first book Empire, won the New Measure Poetry Prize. She currently lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons.

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