Editor’s Choice, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025

All That Glitter is a treasure hunt through the everyday—a collection of poems that takes you on a journey from the quiet of an empty house to dancing with the wild sequins of childhood. It’s about finding the magic in seemingly small moments—from messy craft projects to a spectacular double rainbow on a Tuesday afternoon. With poems that explore both the sweet and the challenging side of mothering two young daughters after a divorce, this chapbook invites you to uncover some of life’s most moving moments. You’ll want to stick around to rediscover what it really means to sparkle.

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Katie Dozier’s All That Glitter is a delightful book about childhood—and the way that daughters can pull a mother into play and wonder and doubt: the other parents think/ I’ve raised a brat. As kids learn their ABCs (there’s even an abecedarian!) their mother invents sophisticated formal poetic challenges and the girls in these poems keep up with their witty observations—”Why are we never running early?” Through haiku, sonnet, villanelle and haibun-like gestures, Dozier’s verse about parenting and neurodiversity, shared custody and making a new home, sparkles.

—DENISE DUHAMEL, author of Pink Lady

Katie Dozier writes with remarkable lyrical dexterity. She flexes and bends language to create imagery heavy with linguistic subtext and meaning. In these intimate and powerful poems, things aren’t always what they seem. Fireworks pose as flowers, eyes are filled with drought, choosing a clove of garlic becomes a morality tale, reach for what/ is heavy for its size, tightly packed and ugly. But while the imagery is layered and complex, running through every poem is a simple, steadfast force: a mother’s profound and abiding love. Every poem pulses with maternal devotion. This is a mother who bought/ the world to make it beautiful for her children. Who dreamed into reality a home that smells of pumpkin pie spice. You can’t read this lovely, bittersweet collection without feeling immensely tender towards the family that populates it. [A] perfect/ little girl/ lost/ in her own/ bamboo forest. A girl who sings to the succulents. A mother who paints her nails in, “I Just Can’t Cope Acabana” nail polish, whose neurodivergent child has tantrums that paint fire-engines/ on the floor. But still, a mother who wraps her children in, Love a kind of/ chrysalis, never/ to be undone. All That Glitter is a spellbinding collection. Once read, these poems will take up permanent residence in your heart.

—NANCY MILLER GOMEZ, author of Inconsolable Objects

Katie Dozier’s All That Glitter is an ode to “otherness” and a peephole into parenting and the heaviness of the world, via singing into hairbrushes and slamming doors. It’s what I call a set of sleight-of-hand poems as Dozier teases us into focusing on a string of “look what’s happening over there”, while skillfully pulling together a powerful concoction of “yoo-hoo, it’s really all happening right here.” Oh, the liberties she takes, her words a series of brushstroke swirls, her intentions a daffodil facing the sun, x-ing out the answers from yesterday. Truth be told (or tattled), this life is short. We could all use a little more glitter and Dozier brings it!

—KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Dirt Songs