High Jump as Icarus Story

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2024 In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports - the high jump. Formally inventive, these poems speak in a capacious voice which can be vulnerable, fragmented, and rapturous; exhorting us to imagine and reimagine our possible selves while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful, and hard-won. Here, the spirit triumphs, even when body falls: 'having/ reached for sunlight,/ even if I failed to hold it.'