All There Is to Lose

Marking Aiden Heung's debut collection, All There Is to Lose is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. The selecting judge, National Book Award Finalist Ilya Kaminsky, praises the resonant particularities and depth of feeling found in these poems, which convert "elegy [into] its driving force." Poet and Critic Felicity Plunkett observes, "Dreams and memory move through these porous, venturesome poems. The spectral jostles with the sensual to tell 'a story in which I could be found.' Achily tender, they open to light, love and the jab of a joke." Poet David Tait notes, "Unsettling and luminous, the poems preserve the memory of Village 915: its volatile seasons and hard-worn inhabitants, its headstones, spirits, and myriad forms of water. Here you'll find not only poems of lyrical beauty, but of grim exactness." The result is a stunning achievement of a first book, what Kaminsky identifies as an exemplar of "that ages-old mode of poetry wherein the poet uses language to break bread with the dead, to bring them back to life, if only for the moment, for a portion of the moment, an instant, before the line breaks." Channeling the poet as medium, "I am the tension on the bow that draws the arrow," Heung writes in "Epilogue." "To lose myself -- that is my destiny."

Aiden Heung (he/they) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous town. After working as a traveling salesman for years, he recently relocated to St. Louis, USA. His poems have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, 声韵诗刊 (Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine), and many other places. He is a finalist for the DISQUIET Prize, a winner of the International Proverse Poetry Prize, and the recipient of 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. He and his work have been generously supported by Varuna, The National Writers' House (Australia) and Swatch Art Peace Hotel residency (Switzerland/ Shanghai, China). He holds an MFA in creative writing from Washington University.