2023 Chapbook Prize Winner: Ava Chen
Winner of the 2023 Palette Chapbook Prize
Ava Chen
You can download the chapbook here.
You can purchase the physical book from Bookshop here.
You can purchase the physical book from Barnes & Noble here.
You can purchase the physical book from Amazon here.
About the Author
Ava Chen is a writer and editor from Massachusetts. The founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sophon Lit, her poetry appears in The Rumpus, Gigantic Sequins, Diode Poetry Journal, Wildness, Sine Theta Magazine, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. She hopes you have a wonderful day.
Praise For Habitual Prayer
“Habitual Prayer seems like a fitting and off title all at once. Sure, these poems indeed are imbued with all the power, intention, mystery, and beauty of prayer, but nothing is habitual, routine, or ordinary about how this poet approaches language. From a poem where “too many dahlias/grow taller than angels” to another that proclaims “I expect blood when/I crack open the softening door,” again and again in this brief and stunning collection I found myself tripping over language so fresh and wise, at times ancient and at times from electric dreamy future, making new all the places we poets have looked to find our work: into death, into the garden, towards love, and into the mirror. Habitual Prayer has made me a fan of this poet’s magic, how they transfigure language into these precise, lush spells and invocations that unsettle me so. The greedy prayer I cast out to my gods: please, please, more of this, more from this poet.”
—Danez Smith, author of four collections, most recently Bluff. For their work, Danez has won The Forward Prize for Best Collection and been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic Circle Award.
“In Ava Chen’s Habitual Prayer, the “I” speaks but is not the subject. Its voices sound like people who’ve made listening an art. Each appeal is both intelligent and heart-forward, generously including an entire world in a single poem, sometimes a line. I’m inspired by the gentleness of these voices, how they highlight a thought or image and let it go without resistance, allowing the next moment to happen, and how tenderly they address the you in each poem. Habitual Prayer writes toward a love so steady I’m left with new possibilities of what poetry can provide: “a soft universe of our own.””
—K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
“Chen’s writing feels like the best kind of dream—vivid and surreal all at once, full of lines that transcends all bounds of the page. Habitual Prayer paints life as a constellation of wings and lightning, of “glass lungs” and “fishnet throat” slipping and surviving. “In these spaces between/going & leaving, briefly/I am unable to die,” Chen writes, constantly drawing out the small, impossible truths of what is holy in our world. Reverent and intensely reactive, Habitual Prayer crystallizes expansive form, exquisite emotion, and Chen’s distinctive voice into declaration and song.”
—Ivi Hua, author of Body, Dissected (kith books, 2024)
“Ava Chen’s Habitual Prayer is at once kaleidoscopic and keenly focused. Each poem is dioramic, a reenactment of scenes domestic and private, a museum of small griefs and loves. Reading this book, I felt that “briefly/I [was] unable to die.”
—Jenna Nesky