Unmet - stephanie roberts

A Finalist for the 2025 A. M. Klein Prize for PoetryThis is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren't caught up in the chorus. Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET is a poetry collection that explores themes of frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Tony Hoagland and Diane Seuss, roberts's musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what could be, negotiating the past without losing hope for the future.