Failure and I Bury the Body

Failure and I Bury the Body by Sasha West, a winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series, describes a road trip with the personification of Failure. The Poet and Failure travel along a desert road, observing the landscape from a vast remove of time and space. The land churns, mountains rise and fall, forests grow and rot. And soon they are joined by The Corpse, a sometimes ungainly, sometime pliant passenger. West, who seems comfortable with inhuman distances, writes their hypothetical journey with a wide-lens, breathing great expanses into her poems.
For more than thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez. The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 by Dan Halpern to ensure the publication of five books of poetry a year by rotating list of five trade, university, and small press publishers.