When the 2025 Vermont Book Award finalists were announced last week on Vermont Public with Jenn Jarecki, poetry finalist Jeff McRae was not listening.
“The Kingdom Where No One Dies,” published by Pulley Press in October, is the title of McRae’s debut poetry collection being honored as a 2025 Vermont Book Award finalist.
Every March since 2014, the prestigious award established by Vermont College of Fine Arts, salutes outstanding local writers in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and children’s literature. This year, McRae, a North Bennington poet and reporter for the Manchester Journal and Bennington Banner, made the list – wonderful news he’d learned after reading a congratulations post on his Facebook feed.
The Kingdom in the title refers to the Northeast Kingdom, the place where McRae grew up on a family farm that has since been sold. For some readers, his collection evokes quintessential Vermont but for McRae, it’s so much more.
While McRae understands why there is a tendency for people to want to lean into the Vermont side of his poems, especially since a big part of his work comes from experiences and life lived in the Northeast Kingdom, he said music, family, and being a parent play an important role as well.
Readers of McRae’s collection have said “The Kingdom Where No One Dies” avoids genre and a single style, comments McRae attributes to the fact that the collection was written over 25 years.
“It’s like ‘the best of,’” McRae said, referring to his collection. “It’s not like 30 of them were written in six months.”
The title of the collection is based on a poem of the same name. McRae said the poem, which is about moving from one place to another when he was a kid, was written while he was in graduate school and that it has had many different titles over the years.
“It was one of those serendipitous moments where I sat down and wrote it in like two minutes,” McRae said, adding that it was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review in 2001. “It just came together. It just worked.”
Another notable poem in the collection, “Musicians in Breughel’s The Peasant Wedding,” was inspired by the well-known painting “The Peasant Wedding,” completed by Flemish painter Pieter Breuhgel the Elder in 1569.
“It just occurred to me one day that these are like jobbing musicians who have a gig playing this wedding,” McRae said, speaking of the two musicians in the painting who are playing for wedding guests while they feast. “And so, I imagined what their lives are like because I’m a musician and I’ve played weddings and it can be a real pain.”
McRae studied at University of New Hampshire, where he met his mentor Serbian-American poet Charles Simic. McRae credits Simic for introducing him to a world beyond American poetry.
“He was the first person I was ever near who was a real high flight artist who’d had a lot of success,” McRae said.
Simic, a poet and professor who passed away in 2023, was the 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry for his collection The World Doesn’t End. Simic was also a U.S Poet Laureate and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient.
“He was my introduction to French poetry and Spanish surrealism and all this stuff that was so important to me and my development,” McRae said.
On May 2, when the 2025 Vermont Book Award winners are announced in Montpelier, McRae will be nervous, but he will not be alone. He plans on taking his wife – if she makes it back in time from their daughter’s Montreal school trip – or his son, who will be celebrating his 17th birthday on the same day.
Also celebrating the evening with McRae will be the other 2025 Vermont Book Award poetry finalists: Carlene Kucharczyk for Strange Hymn, Kristin Dykstra for Dissonance, and Vermont Poet Laureate from 2015 – 2019 Chard deNiord for Westminster West.
For a complete list of the 2025 Vermont Book Award Finalists, visit Vermont Public.org.
