Ashley Anna McHugh won the New Criterion Poetry Prize with her debut collection, Into These Knots. Poems from her new manuscript, How to Burn, have most recently appeared in PN Review, Literary Matters, the Hopkins Review, and 32 Poems.
The way the moths above us know the light / and will not leave it, circling all night. / The way birds wake before the sun—and still / resound for its rising, certain that it will.