The 2019 Red Mountain Poetry Prize awarded to Arne Weingart for UNPRACTICAL THINKING. Publication March 2020.

The poem that won me over is the poem addressed to Mark Strand (the poet unwriting), clever, sly, but loving, nonetheless. And the voice that won me over was the Jewish ironic voice of someone not willing to play it too straight or too crooked—but always with a large dollop of irony. I admire its sober warmth, its sense of history and human slippage. My favorite poem in this book is “The Annual Workman’s Circle Picnic.” Here is the personal intersecting with history and holocaust in a powerful, understated way. This collection is disarming in its warm/cool intelligence. —Marc Hudson, author of East of Sorrow, Judge of the 2019 Red Mountain Poetry Prize