Sara Deniz Akant’s Babette, selected by Maggie Nelson for Rescue Press’ Black Box Poetry Prize, mixes motor-thrum with incantation, promising to “make no pattern / known again.” Perpetually on the move, Babette’s populous—from Penny “turned into a toy” to the always absent, always there—are machines of the living, at once spectre, shell, meat, and instrument. Uneasy in their habits, these poems transition between spaces “not made for inhabitants,” sifting through manor walls as easily as fog banks. Babette is subversive, menacing, infectious.