Winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series
“A tender, achingly pensive debut; a feat of a collection…”
Ariana Benson, author of Black Pastoral, winner of the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Cloud Builder
Cover image forthcoming
photo © Bill Schwab
Forthcoming September 2026, University of Georgia Press
“What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington State, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
“These poems re-awaken long-dead painters, musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to also ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we ‘who haunt / the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look’?”
“‘At the end of the day, the body is a cage the soul falls back to…’ writes Weston Morrow in Cloud Builder, a tender, achingly pensive debut; a feat of a collection that at once covers immense semantic ground, while also maintaining a singular cognizance of its own place in time, the physical body it moves about within and through.
“Morrow writes with astonishing clarity of our present world, its contemporary, pretty-ugly idiosyncrasies of convenience stores and the internet, as though it is the old world—with an affective, but never affected gravitas, a wise-minded reverence for the complexities of human capacity for mourning, for memory and love, even as the social fabric seems to lose another thread with every passing moment.
“Fluent in even the most minute emotional subtleties, here is a speaker whose consciousness never rests, perhaps owing this hyper-awareness to his bearing the name of an uncle who died as a boy, a legacy that seems both millstone and north star—a memory he must always carry, and one he is infinitely guided by. ‘…the sky a stage of grief we pass though in search of horizon,’ ends the first poem, belying an understanding of the ways it has become increasingly impossible to fathom the variance of lives lived, sufferings and joys felt and known, all underneath the same blue expanse.
“And yet, in telling largely of his one life, Weston Morrow has found a way to constellate the clouds, connecting those in his sky to those in every reader’s with eyes open wide enough to find them. Found a way to remind us of the flesh-and-spirit core we share as humans walking this wretched, beautiful earth.”
– Ariana Benson, author of BLACK PASTORAL, winner of the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
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