I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets

Fork Apple Press is honored to publish Alex Baskin's I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets as the winner of The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest (2025).

I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets delves into memory to weave together themes of religion, spirituality, and sexuality. The poems use recollection to reflect and re-examine interpersonal relationships and community systems, and their entanglement with inherited beliefs and rituals. While embracing intimate moments, Baskin mediates empathy and care alongside critique. These poems negotiate cultural knowledge, personal experience, and social calling, centering the speaker's agency in the body. In this way, home, too, is reframed from a definitive, static geography, to a movable, flexible, and shifting presence. To quote the poet himself, "I get to decide where this poem goes / how it moves, what it makes."