Picture reversing a rodeo: the rider flies back onto the horse, the horse bucks into stillness. A whirling cast of characters engage in self-interrogation and self-discovery and wrestle in similar fashion in the pages of Rodeo in Reverse, a debut collection from Lindsey Alexander, which Sean Hill calls “the genuine article.”

Both time machine and microscope, Rodeo in Reverse is woven from bits of Americana: married life, art history, pioneers, and witches. These poems effortlessly traverse personal and historical pasts with tenderness and unrivaled humor. They offer a tour of American landscape—the trees with bitter crop of the South; the plains of the Midwest; the duels of a cartoonish Wild West. At once a wily romp and a lyric sweep, Rodeo in Reverse considers the possibilities and failures of domestic life on the never-ending quest of rounding up, and defining, the self. Rodeo in Reverse is the winner of the 2017 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.