Poetry. This is the first collection of poems by a poet who received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and who grew up on Army posts, mainly in the South. One of the strongest poems in the collection, Major Lewis, tracks the author's intergenerational family's tie to the army, all the way to Vietnam and back to the reverberations of that war in the author's domestic life. Those readers reared in military families will be astounded at the chords (Lunday) strikes, and the echoes of their own lives they will find in the particulars of his--Mary Edwards Wertsch. Robert Lunday has combined a narrative impulse, a desire to tell the story, with an intense lyrical imagination, and the result is MAD FLIGHTS--Thomas Lux.

Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author’s stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family’s experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather’s case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Self- reflective, discursive, and painfully studied, GNOME is a poetic and phenomenological excavation of shadows; the tragicomic dimensions of our inner curiosities and longings that wait pensively to be ruptured into epiphany. Employing a language that devises to question the renegade forces of experience that the soul must both adorn and endure, Lunday confronts the unstable yet tempting relationship between expression and proof, memory and personal reality. Invoking physiological positions from figures ranging from Georges Bataille and Max Picard to Kobo Abe and Elaine Scarry, GNOME is a monologue of mad reveries that endeavors to develop its own impression of love and death, proving that the surfaces we encounter are the materialization of the endless depths at our disposal.