Little Thistles by Stacey Forbes – NWVS #178 – 2023 WINNER

It took less than three lines for this poem to completely get its hooks into me. It has the logic of a dream and the keenness of “a pearl-handled knife.” The voice is elusive, evasive, and irresistible.

–Nicky Beer, on the poem “Dream, with mother of pearl”

Stacey R. Forbes’s Little Thistles is like the body she so often writes about: lean but nourishing, grieving but musical, spare but verdant, distant but familiar. And always filled with love. Here are essential poems of the Sonoran Desert and the wider world where the body—animal human or animal wild—is born of baked earth, weathers the wind and heat, and blooms. As readers, we too flower in Forbes’s intricate, intimate verse, though there is danger. Though there is death. Among the sting and claw, lightning and howl, bone and heart, Little Thistles sings because, through it all, love remains.
–Simmons B. Buntin, author of two collections of poems, Bloom (2010) and Riverfall (2005), and founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org, an award-winning journal publishing since 1998.