The 2024 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, The Twenty-First Century circles the mystery of time with depth and invention. Lovers whisper to each other at summer camp. The vizier of an ancient kingdom recalls the pleasures of his youth. A cockroach in the distant future evolves to write poetry of his own. Chosen by Roger Reeves as the winner of the 2024 APR/Honickman First Book Prize,  The Twenty-First Century  guides us through a breadth of environments and worlds — from far off times and places to the poet in the present, leaving Costco, wandering through the mazy streets of Queens. Drawing from both fictional and autobiographical material, these poems treat a range of subjects: the joys and terrors of childhood, music, art, desire, love. Some are narrative prose poems verging on parable, others lyric meditations or lyric sequences. The language throughout is simple and plainspoken, but the mystery is vast. It is the mystery of time — the fact that we are here and then gone. How can this be, these poems ask again and again, in a chorus of voices and an array of forms, until the question itself becomes a kind of song. Jacob Eigen was born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn. He studied literature and philosophy at Deep Springs College and Yale and fiction writing at Hunter College. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Salmagundi , and The Iowa Review . He currently lives in Chicago. Roger Reeves is the author of Best Barbarian (Norton, 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His debut collection King Me (Copper Canyon, 2013), was a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the year and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY In those days, Japanese restaurants placed tanks of fake, magnetic fish in their vestibules. We would sit at the counter saying I love so-and-so but live with so-and-so-someone-else, and the waiter folding napkins at the corner table would look up from his work and say: please see the fish—the way they approach one side of the tank and then the other, turning and turning in a way that makes us feel they’re alive. But he would say this in Japanese, which at that time we heard as a sequence of meaningless syllables. Because it would be many years until the distinction between all languages was erased. And for us, many bowls of clouded broth.