PublishING February 2027
Bitters
by Christopher Childers
Winner of the 21st Anthony Hecht Prize
Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor
“Anyone familiar with The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse—and everyone interested in poetry in English ought to be—already knows that its editor and translator, Christopher Childers, is a superlatively gifted wielder of traditional poetic forms, and is possessed of a truly fine ear. With Bitters, Childers proves himself to be a greatly skilled maker of original poems as well. The best poems here have a touch of the folk ballad about them. Childers is one of the few poets today maintaining the art even as he enriches it; poetry needs him.”
Randall Mann
“In Bitters, Christopher Childers turns his uncompromising eye to the terrors of marriage, familial loss, and the self. Language may be a warm elixir, but it's also false comfort: "Dark within and dark without / I’ll take my medicine," he writes in "Drinking Song." Learned but haunted by "the chill of knowing," unmasking grief while "wearing the mask of grief," Childers has a technical ease and violent streak reminiscent of Anthony Hecht. The poems in Bitters are highly accomplished, mordant, and visceral.”
Mary Jo Salter
“The poems in Christopher Childers’ Bitters taste time and again of pleasure, itself a favorite word. Love affairs and marriages and friendships are here presented in their sometimes-bitter frustrations. Yet the savor of celebration, good humor, and gratitude is everywhere, not least in moving elegies for the poet’s father, grandfather, and a beloved mentor. A distinguished Classical translator, Childers is also a modern humanist: in these well-turned, wittily serious poems, it is people who matter.”
Joshua Mehigan
“Bitters is shaped, in method and sensibility, by Childers’s immersion in the poetry of classical antiquity. But the poet also worries, falls awkwardly in love, mourns, nurses regrets and joys, speaks of friends, family, and himself with candor and sympathy, often with an unguarded sincerity rare in current poetry. For all the book’s ambient erudition, verbal fluency, and vivid, sometimes Byronic rhyming, readers can hardly avoid discovering something of themselves in it.”
Meet Christopher Childers
Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, out now from Penguin Classics. He has published poems, translations, and prose in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Smartish Pace, and Literary Matters. He is the recipient of an NEA Translators’ Fellowship and winner of the Briar Cliff Review Poetry Contest and the Erskine J. Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. His poem “Miasma” will appear in the forthcoming edition of Best American Poetry.
Christopher holds a BA in Classics from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in Baltimore, MD and teaches Latin at the Gilman School, but will soon be moving to Los Angeles, CA, where his wife will pursue a residency in pathology.