If paradise is a walled garden, then this powerful debut breaks down those walls and invites the outside in and the inside out. These generous and complicated poems unearth the world around us and the worlds within us, too.
—Adam Clay, author of Circle Back and To Make Room for the Sea
Stephan Antoine Viau’s Paradise is a lovely collection of interlinked prose poems that stage encounter after encounter with the world of clouds and stones, birds and berries, wind and rain. Viau writes poems that deftly cross modes of the fable, absurdism, and the lyric, all while “trying to learn how to sleepwalk through the forest.” I’m delighted to take these steps with him.
—Nathan Hoks, author of Nests in Air, Reveilles, and The Narrow Circle
In this long string of gorgeously melancholic prose ballads, Viau’s lush syntax and uncanny imagery reminds us that, in the practice of poetry, there may not be hope, but there are pleasure and possibility. One can detect here the conviction that we must weather every “great calcifying storm,” if only to glimpse the light on the other side.
—Ian U. Lockaby, author of Defensible Space/If a Crow—
Stephan Antoine Viau earned his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. He is the author of Heirlooms and the poetry chapbook mini, Hole. His work has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, Matter Press, ABSTRACT, The Word’s Faire, and HASH, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family.
Title: Paradise
Author: Stephan Antoine Viau
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - March
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 80
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-220-0
If paradise is a walled garden, then this powerful debut breaks down those walls and invites the outside in and the inside out. These generous and complicated poems unearth the world around us and the worlds within us, too.
—Adam Clay, author of Circle Back and To Make Room for the Sea
Stephan Antoine Viau’s Paradise is a lovely collection of interlinked prose poems that stage encounter after encounter with the world of clouds and stones, birds and berries, wind and rain. Viau writes poems that deftly cross modes of the fable, absurdism, and the lyric, all while “trying to learn how to sleepwalk through the forest.” I’m delighted to take these steps with him.
—Nathan Hoks, author of Nests in Air, Reveilles, and The Narrow Circle
In this long string of gorgeously melancholic prose ballads, Viau’s lush syntax and uncanny imagery reminds us that, in the practice of poetry, there may not be hope, but there are pleasure and possibility. One can detect here the conviction that we must weather every “great calcifying storm,” if only to glimpse the light on the other side.
—Ian U. Lockaby, author of Defensible Space/If a Crow—
Stephan Antoine Viau earned his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. He is the author of Heirlooms and the poetry chapbook mini, Hole. His work has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, Matter Press, ABSTRACT, The Word’s Faire, and HASH, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family.
Title: Paradise
Author: Stephan Antoine Viau
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - March
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 80
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-220-0
