Poets and scholars of the creative writing PhD program held a poetry reading in the Vicki Myhren Gallery on April 12. Readers included queer poet Alicia Mountain, recent author of “High Ground Coward” which was recently selected for the highly prestigious 2018 Iowa Poetry Prize.

Alicia Mountain is the recipient of various awards, was an Idyllwild Arts Fellow and a resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and also a Pushcart nominee. Mountain teaches in the creative writing program at DU and is an editor of the Denver Quarterly, a renowned graduate-led poetry journal.

“High Ground Coward” tracts Mountain’s youth in New Jersey and the queer terrain with sensitivity. Centering on the idea of sustenance and starvation, the poems dig into the ways human beings attempt to nourish one another. The book was officially released on April 15.

We splay out the bald hilltop,

Close our eyes to the rolling sky.

My belly hunger-moans when

You lean your head against it—

ferocious, even the softest part of me.

From poem “Upland Honest,” featured in “High Ground Coward.”

Mountain’s great tact lies in her attention to the sensory detail. As Brenda Shaughnessy, judge of the Iowa Poetry Prize, said, “Alicia Mountain looks at every tiny thing very closely, and in doing that conveys the big picture of a vast inner life with marvelous clarity and depth.”

The reading was held in a soft-object installation by Frankie Toan titled Making Art/Making Community. The installation is currently being shown and can be seen during the gallery’s business hours. The work features the household objects of Instagrammers who follow the gallery’s account, and it’s a playful, tactile and colorful experiment which tests the domestic space.

Mountain will be reading at the Dikeou pop-up series on May 3 at 7 p.m. with Sara Akant, Khadijah Queen and Adrienne Raphel, hosted by Ashley Colley. Additionally, Mountain will be teaching advanced creative writing at DU at some point during the 2018-2019 academic year.