True Mistakes

<p><b>Finalist 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize</b><br> <br> In her debut collection <i>True Mistakes</i> 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>