True Mistakes

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time. As the poet goes about daily life-taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression-she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: "e;I often think about things so hard / I kill them."e; And: "e;Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I'm erased?"e; In the context of such ruminations, the poet's reflections on David Hockney's seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight. Working to turn "e;mistakes"e;-misperceptions, errors in life and in art-into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers "e;a truth for every reader,"e; writes series editor Patricia Smith.