Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide

GRAND PRIZE WINNER, THE POETRY BOX CHAPBOOK PRIZE 2025

AS SELECTED BY GEORGE BILGERE

Being alive is strange. Growing up a few miles from a giant elephant that was a hotel and is now a National Historic Landmark can help put things into perspective. Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide is a coming-of-age story for the deeply perplexed. It is a love letter to New Jersey from someone who has lived and worked all over the Garden State. It is an abandoned Ferris Wheel overlooking a run-down casino. It is a seagull stealing what you thought was your last cheese fry, until you look in the bucket and find with great joy there's still one more.

---Review Excerpts---

"...these poems are spoken in one of the freshest, most compelling voices I have encountered in years. He manages the difficult trick of being both funny and deeply serious in the same poem. It's like he peeled off layers of old paint from the English language to discover a long-lost masterpiece."

-GEORGE BILGERE, contest judge, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth

"John Arthur keeps us firmly grounded in the state of New Jersey....The environment breeds both fantasy and cynicism with poems bringing us past the top of the Ferris wheel to the moon or using the implosion of a casino to explain gravity to a child."

-DEBORAH BAYER, author of Rope Made of Bandages

"John Arthur writes from the quiet fault lines between urgency and inaction, compassion and self-preservation...a mash up between craft and the everyday colloquial speech of the playground. These poems refuse easy consolations, instead they live and linger..."

-MATTHEW LIPPMAN, author of We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On