Fludde ― Poems

Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, environmental negligence, corporate exploitation, toxic masculinity. At once surreal and satirical, vulnerable and nostalgic, Mishler channels the voices of disillusioned middle management alongside the freewheeling imaginative vision of children to disrupt the fixity of our received ideas.

Peter Mishler was born in New Jersey, and lives in Kansas City. His poems have appeared at The Winter Anthology, Oversound, Prodigal, diode, Prelude, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. The title poem from this collection was anthologized in Best New Poets. He earned a BFA in literature from Emerson College and both an MS in English Education and an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Mishler is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Syracuse University, and he presently curates a contemporary poetry feature for Literary Hub. This is his first book.