Best International First Collection

UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize

"[Given] is poised at the boundary between eco-poetics and the poetry of personal tragedy. Duncan explores the trauma of environmental cataclysm not simply as context but as metaphor for devastating personal loss through precise images and shattering restraint."

Adroit Journal

"Given is the record of a haunting, a clear-eyed love song to the notion of home, a frame stilled on the highwater mark after the flood. Through finely wrought lyric poems that swell and break with movement, Duncan articulates the speaker’s longing for family and place 'despite the dying world.' Indeed, the world of Given grapples with a precarious future: hurricanes Sandy and Irene loom large in the town’s memory, and the present, where the 'seasons unseason,' are marked by mass die-offs and the threat of subsummation. And just as the world reckons with the catastrophes of the Anthropocene, so too does the speaker attend to staggering personal loss. Yet the collection trembles with a skeptical but persistent hope. Duncan shows us the town she chooses, though 'neighbors head inland, / leaving the keys in the door.' Here the bay, the uncles; there the Wawa, the 'streets with names / that were self-explanatory: Harbor Way. Shore Concourse.' The speaker asks, 'What if my body is not an apocalypse?' Asks, 'What if my body is not a misunderstanding / with the changing earth?' Given argues, granularly, tenderly, that home and place are worth remembering, worth returning to, that roots, however ephemeral, can ground us in the swirling tides of grief."

Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations

“Given testifies to the luminous terror of creation: ‘the sky makes and remakes.’ Then: ‘I had to write myself back into this place, if only to watch it fall apart.’ There is so much here being made and unmade: personal griefs decimated by ecology, ecologies decimated by personal loss. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a poet do what Duncan does here, testifying to loss and endurance this way, in such a radiant braid.” 
 

Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell

"Given is one of the strongest debuts I’ve read in a long time. In an age where market and media forces encourage us to silo our griefs, Given makes the necessary argument that our losses intersect and inform one another: from the loss of a child to the loss of a home, a town, a shoreline, a way of living. The poems are emotionally moving and impressive in formal range, from short lyrics to longer sectioned sequences, incantatory litanies to poems in received forms. In Given, Duncan brings home the lived ramifications of dailiness in an age of ecological peril. The book is a necessary addition to our developing libraries of eco-poetry and docu-poetry and poetry period—Given is a must-read."

Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are