Winner of the 2022 Gatewood Prize, selected by Julie Carr

“Shockingly original, haunting and strange, Olivia Muenz’s I Feel Fine fills me with a kind of longing I cannot properly name. At once novelistic and radically fragmented, achingly confessional and austerely technical, Muenz’s prose poems place me exactly where I want to be as a reader. I am at once moved by a voice and excited by a form, emotionally caught and cognitively awakened. With a syntax all their own, these poems make me sweat and make me marvel. Read them. Find poetry once again bright, new, and necessary. “

—Julie Carr, 2022 Gatewood Prize judge

“I Feel Fine is a book of fine feelings, a record and enactment of feeling finally and finely. Chopped. Think of the “I” as a blade, dicing experience? [...] Muenz’ work should be read within the fine tradition of modern and post-modern investigations of failure, while also being recognized as an important addition to the field of disability studies [...]. In her short, sometimes one-word sentences, urgently compelling in their staccato rhythm, Muenz makes it clear that language itself is a connective tissue disorder we all have—all we have—to communicate the fragility of presence, intimacy, attention, and life. This first full length collection by a gifted, brilliant, and brave poet offers readers a fine way to connect to our own embodiment, the body’s plentitudes and exhaustions, our swell and not so swell swellings and deflations: “We are. Fine.” Muenz writes. Uh huh. I love. This. Book. “

 —Laura Mullen, author of Dark Archive