True Mistakes
About this book
Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.
As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: "I often think about things so hard / I kill them." And: "Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I'm erased?" In the context of such ruminations, the poet's reflections on David Hockney's seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.
Working to turn "mistakes"—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers "a truth for every reader," writes series editor Patricia Smith.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Opening Questions for God or the Artist
- The Gate
- Awe
- Figure Drawing: Ancestor
- Aubade in a New City
- Dear Future Me #8
- Celebrity
- Winter Photograph: Lifescape
- Not Happiness
- The Train
- Staying
- The Hill
- Thrive
- Dear Future Me #6
- Alarm
- Great Fears
- Second Person
- Figure Drawing: Lover
- Scene with Nude, Helen Frankenthaler, 1952
- Dear Future Me #4
- Removing the Dirt
- Dear Future Me #1
- The Water
- The Doorway
- Figure Drawing: Elegy
- A Coat with No One Inside It
- Heaven
- Dear Future Me #10
- Powder Down
- Arabesque
- Dear Future Me #11
- Methods of Distraction
- Dear Future Me #12
- I Stare Out the Window and Grow Bewildered
- Verdigris
- Dear Future Me #15
- Figure Drawing: Future Me
- Dear Past Me
- Recovering
- I’ve Been Running the Same Loop Every Morning Since January
- Monstera
- Untitled (after Joan Mitchell)
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
