Arguments
Benjamin Gucciardi

2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award Winner

Written in a time of environmental collapse and social unrest, the poems in Arguments confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life.
Moving through domestic spaces, a climate activist camp, and landscapes of the American West, Benjamin Gucciardi blends lyric and formal poems to ask urgent questions: What responsibilities to we bear to one another? How are we entangled in the systems we seek to dismantle? What place does violent resistance hold? How do we sustain an inner life in a material-driven world—and how, in the face of grief, do we balance private mourning with collective obligation? 

“Poems to make you think and cry and maybe love.”
—Rebecca Solnit

Benjamin Gucciardi is the author the collection West Portal, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. His poems appear in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY and elsewhere, and have been featured in On Being’s "Poetry Unbound," Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.

Trade Paperback / $17.00 (Can. $25.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-645-8 / 72 pages / Poetry