Eve Alexandra (left) and Sarah Audsley (right)

SARAH AUDSLEY and EVE ALEXANDRA, both poets based in Vermont, share a complicated connection to the landscape and the place they call home. Each leverages the pastoral; however, both poets upend the pastoral’s tradition to explore identity, gender, familial relationships, grief, and their connection (or dislocation) to place. None of Us in White, recipient of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize and published in 2025, is Eve Alexandra’s second poetry collection. Carl Phillips’ quotation, “Brokenness you do surprise me,” is the epigram with which Alexandra introduces and envisions her collection as it investigates grief and reaches towards elegy with an unsettled sense of belonging.