Potions. Part poem. Part fiction. There are 75 potions in this Book of Potions. So what are they, these genre-bending vignettes? When you go in to read them, you’ll fall right in, and it really won’t matter what you call them.
Let’s call them potions. They are like prose poems, like narratives that move with speed and urgency, with candor and metaphor.
The speaker most times is a woman navigating the things that come in the middle of life. She isn’t young, but she isn’t old. She’s in between, in the middle—a prisoner of stereotypes and expectations and social norms that don’t make any sense at all in the middle years, a time when most of us have figured things out. We question, we opine, we reject—because we want to live out the rest of our lives in ways that matter and that are no longer controlled by expectation and projections of what we are supposed to be at this stage of life.
Sometimes our speaker—our narrator, our protagonist—is exasperated. Sometimes she is lost in something she finds beautiful and clever. And readers go along with her from potion to potion. A spell is cast. We move through fables and scenes, satire and pure insight.
The potions are small bombs that explode some fearsome thing. The potions are salves that come to us—like books do—when we need them the most.
Lauren K. Watel is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. Book of Potions, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books, is her first book. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. Her work has also won awards from Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation and Mississippi Review. Her prose poem honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was set to music by Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and the piece premiered at the Dallas Symphony. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, she lives in Decatur, Georgia.
Book of Potions by Lauren K. Watel is the winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.
Learn more about Lauren K. Watel here.
