Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeIn a voice at times electrified by caustic cynicism, at other times stripped bare by grief, Casey Thayer's Rational Anthem offers wry tribute to "the greatest country God could craft with the mules he had / on hand." In seeking to tell the story of the ragged world around him, Thayer examines the links among flag-waving populism, religious fervor, and toxic masculinity. Here male intimacy-among childhood friends, between father and son, and in the tenuous bonds between young adults-generally finds acceptance only when expressed through a shared passion for guns and hunting: "I helped my father clean his hands with field grass, / convinced we had shared a moment / in rolling the internal organs out of the abdomen." In "How-To," the book's closer-a mash-up of instructions from active-shooter trainings attended by the poet-Thayer grasps at strategies for surviving a world where we have come to see school shootings as routine: "Grab a textbook, they instructed my child, and hug it to your chest over your heart." Formally deft and lyrically dense, Rational Anthem asks why we find it so hard to change the stories we keep repeating.

Part fun-house hall of mirrors in its distorted and dizzying central narrative, part spaghetti western, and part prayer, Self-Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur is an exploration into the possibilities of storytelling. Through persona poems and odes, the collection argues that the muddier the narrative, the closer the story gets to truth.