Winner, 2020 James Laughlin Award
“The flawed and ordinary self refracted through the complex prisms of race, gender, and culture—Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a lyric reckoning of extraordinary candor. Often startlingly intimate, Field Study discloses and calls out, laughs and glares, and inhabits urbane knowing and tender uncertainty by turns. In tandem with its thematic breadth, the book’s formal amplitude encompasses an exuberant intersectionality of genres—the epistolary mode, the lyric essay, the commonplace book, the confession, the literary collage, the tweet-like salvo. The result is a book-long poem that wholly invigorates poetry as a category. Field Study is unlike anything its readers will have encountered before—a work of fierce intensity and engulfment.”
—Rick Barot, Award Judge