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.

“The Other Altar is a portal, a door to a wide, many-mouthed, micro/cosmic field. Both door and field are in moving states of reaching and opening, closing and unknown. It is a book of this field, a work of wonder and precision, a whole inner/outer dimension imagined and delivered as a soulful cry against the crushing cold of capitalism, of towering, toppling institutions fundamentally opposed to human perspective. The door the poet offers readers opens onto our very connection: roots and a ring of hands to hold, a daughter, poetry, more portals, more sky, more ways to look inside ourselves and find each other. The beauty of this book’s vision is beyond measure—the pages can’t contain it, so Gulig has generously nestled book within book within book to unfold this beauty. “A mouth is not a wilderness,” he writes. Every line here is like that: irreducible, exquisite, alight with the joy and anguish of being, here all at once as we are.”

—Brenda Shaughnessy, final judge

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 an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives in Fort Atkinson with his wife and two daughters.