Winner of the 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize

Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us.

[Sample Poem]

Love Poem With Dereliction of Duty

It's true—I like you more than I like

the Marquis de Sade; God that

mid-April afternoon in 1995,

when I said, "let's take a walk"

and you said "sure" and we circled

the New Haven Green saying

who the hell knows what

because if we had seen

all this falling in love stuff coming, we

would have paid more attention;

I just know it took two hours,

past the churches and the porn shop

and over to the cemetery with all

those skull-topped slabs leaning

memorially against the brownstone wall;

round and round we went like marbles

dodging the traps in a game

of labyrinth; and finally back

to campus through that big stone gate

which we entered just as the prof

of the philosophy class I was skipping

came out and I said oh the pain

the pain I can't take it any more

and doubled up laughing