Annelyse Gelman’s latest book, Vexations (2023, the University of Chicago Press, winner of the 2022 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets), is a book-length poem about a mother and daughter navigating social and ecological collapse. Titled and structured after Erik Satie’s “Vexations” for solo piano—which instructed the pianist about how to prepare to “play this to yourself 840 times in a row”—Vexations is also an experiment in form—poem as guided meditation, poem as text score, poem as furniture music.

Gelman is also the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (2014, Write Bloody), the artist’s book POOL (2020, NECK Press), and the EP About Repulsion (2019, Fonograf Editions). She is the founder and director of Midst (www.midst.press), a digital platform for capturing, saving, and sharing the writing processes of contemporary poets.

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