We are delighted to announce that our 2026 Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence is Adam Giannelli. Adam will join us in Franconia to stay at Frost’s former farmhouse this July to do his work as a poet, and give several readings in the area.
Our final judge was Matthew Olzmann, who expressed how difficult the decision was due to the overwhelming talent displayed in this year’s submissions. Our runners-up are Sandra Beasley, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and James May, who will join us for an online reading this summer.
The aim of this program is to select a poet who is at an artistic and personal crossroads, comparable to that faced by Robert Frost when he moved to Franconia in 1915, when he was not yet known to a broad public. The program began in 1977 and has been sponsored by Dartmouth College since 2012.
Adam Giannelli is the author of Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017), winner of the
Iowa Poetry Prize; the translator of Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012), a selection of prose poems by
Marosa di Giorgio; and the editor of High Lonesome (Oberlin College Press, 2006), a collection
of essays on Charles Wright. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England
Review, Ploughshares, Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, New Criterion, and elsewhere. His
work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from several institutions, including the
National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Program, James Merrill House, Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell. He has taught at Oberlin
College, Hamilton College, Colby College, and Purdue University.
More at: https://www.adamgiannelli.com/
“Adam Giannelli writes astonishing poems that I hold in the highest regard. Inventive and tender, full of grace and precision, sliding in and out of metaphor while illuminating something of the human spirit. Often exploring the stutter, these poems can reframe and defamiliarize assumptions one might have about how we connect with and inhabit the world. When I read these poems, language itself feels more vast and mysterious than I previously might have imagined.” — Matthew Olzmann
“I am thrilled to be the 2026 Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place! It is a wonderful
opportunity to learn more about Robert Frost and the landscape that inspired him. Not only is it
a historic farmhouse where Frost lived with his family, it’s a center for poetry that has housed a
remarkable list of writers over the years with a poetry trail, seminars, and Sunday shares. I look
forward to meeting local poetry lovers, sharing my work, and focusing on my next project. I was
touched by William Matthews’s poem about his residency, which includes blackberry picking. I
often incorporate bits of my daily life into my writing, and I’m excited to see how my voice
broadens among the White Mountains. I am very grateful to the Frost Place and the judge
Matthew Olzmann for this gift of time, space, and community, and I’m excited to travel to New
Hampshire this summer on a road that I hope will make “all the difference.” — Adam Giannelli
Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia—in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure along the rumbling shoreline of Rockaway or during the intermediary hours that an insomniac undergoes between darkness and dawn. Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and Eros-tinged meditations, this hovering never subsides but offers, among the fragments, momentary constellations: “moths all swarming the / same light bulb.”
From the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves—a stutterer’s maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation—become forms of consolation. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.
Certain words are still warm with your touch: stutter,
for instance. It always gives me trouble. Perhaps
it’s because saying it reminds me of you, as though
I’m calling for you. & then there’s my name.
It seems like bad luck to stutter on your own name,
but I don’t think it’s an accident. As a child,
I was always nervous when I had to introduce myself.
Other words, the way a pillow preserves the indentation
of a head, also hold your impression: Cleveland
(my hometown), Chadbourne (the street I grew up on),
Oberlin (my college). It’s as though they belong
more to you than me, which seems cruel because
they constitute my home. If we ever part, you’re getting
Ohio. Other words, though, you couldn’t care less about.
I would be happy to give you squeegee. I’ll trade you
Cleveland for festooned. Considering that I’m a writer,
giving up festooned is a real sacrifice. Plus, it’s great
around the holidays. I’ll even throw in hullaballoo.
& why do you like L-words so much? Lunch, lion,
limelight. You stretch them out like a kid with
silly putty. It’s as though L-words are my Achilles heel.
Once at a writing conference, when I was younger
& thinner, I walked off the stage to a round of applause,
& later that evening another writer told me
he would be jealous if it wasn’t for my stutter.
He reached for the first thing he could grasp to take me
down, but the part of the story that really stings
is that at the time I believed him. You are the ache
I can’t dislodge & won’t confess, not even to myself.
Achilles, though, chose a short, momentous life over
a long & peaceful one. Where would I be without you?
We spent so much time alone together, skipping
stones across the river or staring at the telephone.
I have a better sense now of what it means to crouch
behind trees, to walk between briars, or to break full
throttle into the water through a pane of ice.
Some nights I take the garbage to the curb,
& the moon is as thin as a water stain in the sky.
In the morning, as I drive to work, mist hangs
between the trees like cobwebs. In class, one student
blushes every time I call on her. When she speaks,
she looks down at the ground, as though it were