FIRST PLACE WINNER, THE POETRY BOX CHAPBOOK PRIZE 2019

Lauren Tivey embarks on a trip to Morocco, a foreign landscape of exciting people, smells, and destinations, with her alcoholic husband. She carries with her a dread of what she may face with her husband’s disease in a Muslim country. In beautifully-executed and moving poetic forms, she takes the reader with her through the landscapes of Ramadan and his alcoholism, family histories with drunkenness and rehab, and her moments of stillness when she is alone with mint tea and her journal. We feel how hard it is to stuff love, fear, and compassion in a suitcase just to unpack again in a new port of call.

–Tricia Knoll, Contest Judge, 2019, author of How I Learned to Be White and Broadfork Farm

Lauren Tivey is an uncanny poet, conjuring metaphor and image to convey the tale of a husband and wife at the edge of love’s limit.

–Holly Iglesias, author of Sleeping Things

These poems, gathered so astutely in Moroccan Holiday, have such exquisite and crisp detail that they will haunt you for a while.

–Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems