The Long Now Conditions Permit by Jami Macarty
Winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize
University of Nevada Press, December 2025
The precarities, brutalities, and wonders of being, occurring, and relating are everywhere in the poems of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Poetry Prize. The poems situate and resituate across ecotones and other moving, speaking, vulnerable bodies in the threatened animal-botanical-physical world. Among the most vulnerable are women and girls. These poems are married to the consciousnesses of being a woman whose life of historical and impending threat does not permit her to imagine a future unencumbered by fear and violence. Questions of political and economic power loom: What price do humans and ecologies pay for an increasingly global extractive-consumptive paradigm? What can one afford to do or not? What time is ours, alone and in communion? Which friendship bastion, which betrayal? Who can go for a walk without looking over her shoulder? Who can swim in the quarry without becoming a predator’s quarry? Via insistent lyric imperatives to grapple, articulate, and describe, these poems counter oppression and taboo. They strive to ward off further wounding and damage. Violence, stigma, shame, and ferocity are indirectly, but by insistent juxtaposition, contextualized in a world of birds. The speakers in the poems search for a way to move beyond pain and reclaim lost portions of the traumatized self — by walking, running, by flying.
Cover photo: Masahiko Kuroki
