Terminarch (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Terminarch, winner of the 2023 Able Muse Book Award, is Jennifer Keith's debut full-length poetry collection. The title, a neologism that evokes both terminus and matriarch, signals a collection that confronts endings and what survives-personal, cultural, and ecological. Keith's poems move from intimate meditations on memory, grief, and family loss to broader reflections on extinction (including the passenger pigeon's "endling"), technology, and the traces we leave behind. Working in free verse and traditional forms with dark wit and lyric intensity, Terminarch maps the terrain between loss and resilience, finding in language itself a means of preservation and renewal. Jennifer Keith's brilliant Terminarch is filled with endings and endlings: the rabbit "terrified" by a hawk's "skeleton dance," Captain Quint's final slide into the shark's mouth in Jaws, or Martha, the last passenger pigeon, closely watched up to the moment "she'd finally meet / good Mister Audubon." A rescued alligator plant proves so dangerously hardy that it has to be destroyed, becoming a metaphor of malignancy, while "Under the Ice" offers a literal rebirth when its resuscitated protagonist survives shock and…