GLIB

Winner of the 2025 Changes Book Prize, selected by Eileen Myles.

Ashley Escobar botanizes the parking lots of Bob's Big Boy, Cumbies, and Brick Oven Pizza, mining limestone quarries and plastic factories for material for her sparkling, knowing, and fast­-paced debut. Glib is flush with characters and cultural touchstones, other poets, novelists, musicians, directors. "They are very crowded poems, there's lots of stuff but I don't get full;' Eileen Myles writes in their preface. Not sardonic, not moralizing, never jaded or didactic, sometimes tender, sometimes cutting, not indifferent but also not talcing it personally, Escobar's poems proceed by marking—usually without further remark, never forcing an insight or observation, just pointing out, glibly—the myriad contradictions, miracles, incoherences, and indignities that make up their world. And still, the nervy syntax and insouciant attitude give way to occasions of pure equipoise, as in the final moments of an eight-line poem that ends, simply, perfectly, "I love being alive with you." 

"The world we write is the world we live in," this book tells us. There is enough world in the poems that it hardly seems a stretch.