Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length poetry collection “Rodeo”—selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize—is a book about the grief of losing a child, but even moreso, a book about the profound love that is at the root of all grieving. Wilkinson, quoting Mary Oliver, aptly defines her own work, saying “My work is loving the world.” This book is a roadmap for anyone wondering how to find their way back to that love again.

In these pages, life and death exist beside each other as equal subjects of interest. The beautiful and the grotesque are given the same careful attention. For example, Wilkinson spots a grotesque, mutilated, dead badger on a hike and describes “how like a child he is, limp and innocent in sleep.” She goes on to compare his dead body to prayer. Throughout the book, we see how this intimacy with death is an essential relationship that brings us closer to the meaning of life.

Wilkinson reveres the beautiful in equal turn, finding it in unexpected gestures of kindness, connection, and love. She describes the beauty of a man on a motorcycle offering hotdogs to wild coyotes, saying “It’s tenderness that makes \ Harley man lift his arm…and fling the last hot dog \ like a blessing.”

Wilkinson also brings our awareness to time and the fact that we are part of an immense human lineage. This makes mundane chores seem regal in their ceremonial nature. “Today is ancient,” she tells us. She jars jam with bloody juice on her hands “like Lady Macbeth,” collects seeds at Home Depot while she’s lost and looking for meaning in flowers “like Ophelia.”

If there was ever a book to remind you of the significance of simply being alive, and the profound gift of basic animal pleasures—bread, jam and sleeping safely beside the animals that you love—this is it.

Lauren Mantis is a lesbian southerner living in Portland, Oregon. She writes to learn about nature and human nature. Lauren earned her MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and her MS in technical communication at NC State. She has work published and forthcoming in Harbor Review, Pool Party Mag, and more. Learn more about her work at www.laurenmantis.com.