Selected by Patricia Smith for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry series
One of Literary Hub’s favorite books of 2025
One of Debutiful’s best poetry books of the year
In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.
As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.” And: “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.
Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.
Order from Bookshop.org here
Order from University of Arkansas Press here
"True Mistakes is a lyrical surface for our vulnerabilities, an admission that the human family, for all its boisterous songs and bright colors, is a family of fracture. The tender but forthright avowals in True Mistakes are ones I recognize and have struggled to hear. In these poems, Lena is in frank conversation with her flawed, confounded, and tentative self, and within that revelatory dialogue lurks a truth for every reader." —Patricia Smith
“In True Mistakes, Lena Moses-Schmitt’s fabulous debut, this superb poet and visual artist narrows the distance between faces and flowers, between death and children, thinking and living, making art and seeing the future. Moses-Schmitt teaches us to eye with suspicion the marks on any surface (whether page, painting, or pavement), and at the same time to practice making ourselves available to being moved. The poet holds these two impulses in expert, thrilling tension. I loved reading this book. It’s left me all stirred up!”
—Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons
“Who are we to ourselves? Alone or in the world, in the past or in the future? Can we change, or stop changing? Who is reflected in ‘the painting, which is actually the window’? True Mistakes is full of movement (‘so dazzling you forget to console yourself / in the second person’), and its poems are endlessly questing, that word that suggests both a search and a question—they make living an act of asking.”
—Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
“Once in a very blue moon, you will receive into your possession a book of poetry so correct, so completely transcendent and transforming, seemingly, somehow, about your specific, small life, while also about the grand majestic nature of existence itself, that it, in its incisive accuracy, will nearly do you in. True Mistakes is such a collection for me . . . It’s the kind of book I need with me wherever I go . . . It’s my companion, and my guide. Both a mirror and a pathway to somewhere bigger. Lena Moses-Schmitt is aware of death. And she’s aware of beauty. She’s aware of the dailiness of life, the pleasure we can create, and take, and she’s aware of the cavernous desire beneath our lived existence: for meaning, for permanence. Moses-Schmitt has, without realizing it perhaps, in thinking aloud about her fears, and fixations, and ruminations, about her drawings, and her flowers, and her friends, and her desires, managed to do the thing she would never dare to dream. With True Mistakes, she has, in a sense, beat death. She has made something real. She has made something that made the world better. She has made something that will live on: she’s made something that will truly last.” —Julia Hass, Literary Hub
“Moses-Schmitt’s dazzling poems center the importance of carefully wrought introspection in negotiating the distance between writing and living.” —Danielle Shi, ZYZZYVA
“For Moses-Schmitt, a writer and visual artist, the image is at once an attempt to reach beyond the self and also a relentless reaffirmation of the inescapability of the self . . . What is all this looking for? The speaker seems to understand the contradictions of her impulses, that to dissolve into pure looking would be a languageless state of being, not a book full of words trying to describe it. It is exactly this contradiction, this push and pull of consciousness, the mind’s cyclical self-criticisms, that these poems seek to capture—the shapelessness of what is rather than the shaped narratives of what is named.” —Emily Alexander, Diode Poetry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Interviews, Conversations, etc.
"Giving the Poem a Body”: Megan Pinto interviews Lena Moses-Schmitt at The Common
“Art and Craft: An Illustrated Conversation Between Lena Moses-Schmitt and Martha Park” at Literary Hub
“A Conversation Between Lena Moses-Schmitt and Sarah Lyn Rogers” at The Adroit Journal
Listen to three poems from True Mistakes at the Debutiful podcast’s First Taste series