True Mistakes

By Lena Moses-Schmitt

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.

As the poet goes about daily life-taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression-she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: "I often think about things so hard / I kill them." And: "Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I'm erased?" In the context of such ruminations, the poet's reflections on David Hockney's seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.

Working to turn "mistakes"-misperceptions, errors in life and in art-into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers "a truth for every reader," writes series editor Patricia Smith.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1682262707
• ISBN13: 9781682262702
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"