Nicholas Gulig’s third collection of poetry, The Other Altar, unearths a landscape where the experience of loss is both local and global, personal and political, here and far away. The speaker of these poems wanders in a world illumined at every turn by ghosts whose shape and form he hopes to language in a litany of books, one inside the other. Haunting these pages are the specter of a dead father and the racial violence of a specifically American time and place. Against this backdrop of abiding heartache, Gulig turns to those he loves and to whom he feels indebted—his wife and children, his friends, and to the ghosts of other writers, his literary ancestors—trusting that a language rooted beyond the borders of our collective isolation, a poetry formed upon the altar of other people, might guide the self in the direction of a reenchanted, less solitary experience of creation. The Other Altar is a book that struggles on every page to remind the reader that grief and grace are intertwined, that liberation is a path we walk together, hand in hand and heart to heart, a place we speak into existence when the distance between word and world dissolves. 

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Eau Claire and the 2023-24 Wisconsin Poet Laureate. The author of North of Order (YesYes Books) and Orient (CSU Poetry Center), he is associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives in Fort Atkinson with his wife and two daughters.

Colorado prize for poetry, 2024