Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide

by John Arthur

Grand Prize Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025

Being alive is strange. Growing up a few miles from a giant elephant that was a hotel and is now a National Historic Landmark can help put things into perspective. Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide is a coming-of-age story for the deeply perplexed. It is a love letter to New Jersey from someone who has lived and worked all over the Garden State. It is an abandoned Ferris Wheel overlooking a run-down casino. It is a seagull stealing what you thought was your last cheese fry, until you look in the bucket and find with great joy there’s still one more.

Enjoy a video of John reading from his new book:

Early Praise

John Arthur describes Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide as a love letter to New Jersey, a state full of “run-down casinos and strange historic landmarks overlooking the sea. It is surf rock mixed with punk at a dive bar off an alley on the Jersey Shore.” What he doesn’t mention is that these poems are spoken in one of the freshest, most compelling voices I have encountered in years. He manages the difficult trick of being both funny and deeply serious in the same poem. It’s like he peeled off layers of old paint from the English language to discover a long-lost masterpiece.

—GEORGE BILGERE, contest judge, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth

In Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, varied forms and interesting structures are on display: haiku, haibun, braided and stream-of-consciousness poems. John Arthur keeps us firmly grounded in the state of New Jersey. The place shapes how its residents study, love, and work, with the smell of onions permeating their work clothes. The environment breeds both fantasy and cynicism with poems bringing us past the top of the Ferris wheel to the moon or using the implosion of a casino to explain gravity to a child.

—DEBORAH BAYER, author of Rope Made of Bandages

In Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, John Arthur writes from the quiet fault lines between urgency and inaction, compassion and self-preservation. This book is a mash up between craft and the everyday colloquial speech of the playground. These poems refuse easy consolations, instead they live and linger in the moments when we hear the world calling out—sometimes faintly, sometimes in shattering crescendos—and choose to stay in bed, to keep scrolling, to make coffee. And sometimes, like in the poem “Atlantic Cape Community College,” to hear the speaker holler, And this fuckin’ guy…, Arthur’s voice is tender and unflinching, charting the uneasy coexistence of intimacy and indifference in a world oversaturated with need. This is a book about the distance between the sorrow of the human condition and the answers that never come, even though we fight, every day, into the colors of hope, the elephants always knowing more than we do.

 —MATTHEW LIPPMAN, author of We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On 

About the Author

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Frogpond, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, and many other places. He has worked as a valet at a casino, a waiter, a Ferris Wheel operator, a cook, a pizza delivery driver, a fast food delivery driver, a kati roll delivery driver, a landscaper for a week or so, a journalist, an editor, a librarian, a library director, a municipal manager, and for one long, hot day as a guy going door to door asking if you’d like to donate to the Sierra Club. His band is The Deafening Colors.

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