Winner of the 2025 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Prize
“Although the poems in Gabriel Furshong's Surrounding the Country A Chasm are set in the aftermath of the brutal 36-year civil war in Guatemala, which ended in 1996, they take seriously a question especially resonant in our time: how to bear witness to the suffering of others, our "eyes for looking and seeing / all that passes beyond reach." Furshong approaches his task with restraint, with respect as well as exactitude, which results in poems that are both quiet—a whisper in a church or at a funeral—and devastating. He witnesses the reburial of a child pulled from a mass grave, "a scrap of rotten cloth [matched] to a bright bolt in the cupboard" and the marks of barbed wire "twisted turn by turn" beneath a man's sleeve. The diction of these poems is deceptively simple, the images crystalline, powerfully conveying the trauma of war borne by those who survive it.”
Melissa Kwasny, former Montana Poet Laureate, author of seven poetry collections, and recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley and Alice Fay di Castognola awards
“In this powerful collection, Gabriel Furshong transforms heart-wrenching stories of lives irrevocably changed by the horrors of civil war in Guatemala. These poems enact one of literature’s oldest and most noble missions—to bear witness. With stalwart dedication and fierce attention to his poetic influences, Czesław Miłosz and Carolyn Forché, and with the precision of a journalist, Furshong crafts poems that honor the particular circumstances of the individuals captured in these lines while performing the literary alchemy that allows them to also call to mind the 200,000 people who were killed in this brutal conflict. Careful never to appropriate, Furshong faithfully reports stories he was told by survivors that, without this poetic account, might have been erased. These poems are as relevant now as they were when they were first begun in 2005—with our country just as culpable in atrocities here and overseas.”
Jennifer Franklin, the author of four poetry collections, including A Fire in Her Brain, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, 2026)