Debris Field
Rachel Rothenberg

2026 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry winner

Debris Field is an anti-elegy that reassembles the materials of individual and public catastrophe at the crash site of the Flight 93 National Memorial. A formal and critical response to 9/11, the collection implicitly retraces the flight path between Newark Airport and the coal fields of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, as well as the poet's departure from Lisbon, where she was living when her father died in the crash of the flight. First person narrative is countered by a chorus of interlocutors: half sisters that weigh intimacy against estrangement; the beekeeper that oversees a remediation of the ecological ruin of the debris field; curators tasked with archiving the disaster; and the search dogs that question systems of power as they comb the crash site for bodies and remains. A refusal of imperial narratives, the redemption arc, and the voyeuristic gaze, Debris Field constructs a personal and speculative archive outside the bounds of institutional memory.

Rachel Rothenberg is the author of Debris Field (Persea, 2027), winner of the 2026 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Recently awarded the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize and the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize in Poetry, her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2025, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Salt Hill, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, and is Senior Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can. $24.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-660-1 / 80 pages / Poetry