“Letter Sent and Subsequently Returned by the Mailman,” a poem in Jackson Holbert’s debut book, begins with an arresting image of a solitary figure: “Every now and then/ in the middle of the night/ I take my whitest sheet of paper/ out of the closet/ and begin/ another letter to you.”

It’s a stark embodiment of stubborn hope — and a glimpse at Holbert’s nocturnal routine. The 29-year-old author of the poetry collection “Winter Stranger,” out Tuesday, June 13, admits he writes almost “exclusively from 2 to 5 a.m.”

“It’s the beauty of the fellowship schedule,” he said.

As a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Holbert, who lives in Oakland, is required to take one class a semester. Otherwise, he sets his own hours, and like the character in the R.E.M. song, he’s a daysleeper.

“I have pretty bad ADD and as a result, during the day, the possibility of being distracted can really make writing hard,” Holbert said. “So doing stuff in the middle of the night, the likelihood of being distracted is extremely low.”

The predawn hours have been kind to Holbert. In 2022, he won the prestigious Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, among the most lucrative first-book awards in poetry.

Named after a Los Angeles writer who died of cancer at 25 in 2016, the Ritvo prize, awarded annually by Minneapolis publisher Milkweed Editions, goes to a poet yet to publish a collection. The winner gets $10,000; Milkweed also publishes their debut collection in a handsome hardcover.

The oldest poems in “Winter Stranger” were written about a decade ago, when Holbert was living in his rural Washington state hometown. Others date to his undergraduate days in Massachusetts and his time as a fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.

That Holbert writes when the city around him sleeps won’t surprise anyone who reads “Winter Stranger.” If Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” depict people he spotted in Manhattan at midday, many of the poems in Holbert’s debut have a dark-of-night feel.

His verse is populated by fictional characters — some modeled on people he grew up around — struggling with addiction, loneliness and mental health crises. One of Holbert’s characters is “dopesick at fifteen”; another commits suicide; a third deliberately kills a cat.

“When the pills entered my life/ I knew what to do, but I didn’t/ know what to do when they stayed,” he writes in a poem titled “Unsent Letter to Jakob.”

Henri Cole, an esteemed author of numerous poetry collections, hailed Holbert’s “direct, minimalist” style.

“That seems effortless,” Cole said, “but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that that’s the result of an enormous amount of control, and that’s unusual in a young person.”

Cole has been the sole Ritvo judge since the prize was established. (Louise Glück, the Nobel Prize winner who recently joined Stanford’s faculty, takes over as judge this year.) Cole worked with a group of “first readers” to winnow entries — in 2022, there were more than 1,000 — to the several dozen from which he selected a winner, said Milkweed publisher Daniel Slager.

For all their harrowing details, Holbert’s poems are emotionally generous. They blend accessible language with imagery that feels familiar yet beguilingly strange. In a poem titled, appropriately enough, “Poem,” Holbert writes of an enduring memory of a friend: “your mother yelling for dinner, the whole country/ out the window behind you, our whole/ strange country laid before us in the way/ a king lays his knives on the table.”

The nearly three dozen poems in “Winter Stranger” represent a small fraction of Holbert’s output. “Between 2015 and 2022, I probably wrote 1,200 poems,” he said. “A lot of that was just, very early on, trying to figure out what a good poem was and what writing a good poem felt like. And the best way to learn that, to me, is just doing it over and over and over again, developing an intuitive sense of when something is working and when something isn’t.”

Holbert诗歌经常提到的河流、树木nd snow. The latter “looks like crushed pills” in one poem; in others it blankets a pumpkin patch and a cemetery, as well as roads, hills and “the great peaks.” Snow lends itself to metaphorical imagery, he said, because “it tracks things, and you can imprint yourself upon it. It sort of holds the history of what has been on it, but all the time it’s fading away and erasing that history.”

Slager said Holbert’s poetry reveals a special facility for wrestling with “big philosophical questions” about mortality in the shadow of the opioid crisis.

“There is a kind of a grit,” he said, “combined with beautiful sophistication lyrically in the work.”

Holbert is the fourth of six Ritvo recipients with strong Bay Area ties. Ryann Stevenson, the 2021 winner, lives in Oakland. John James, an English graduate student at UC Berkeley, and Grady Chambers, a past Stegner fellow, have also won.

Whatever his future holds, Holbert is determined not to get too full of himself. On his YouTube channel, he taste-tests candy, snacks and nonedible products. “My intellectual basis for the YouTube stuff is that I think poets should be stupider,” he said.

Call it a one-man campaign to dispel the notion that poets are self-serious. Anyone who watches Holbert taste shampoo will have to concede that it’s working.

Kevin Canfield is a freelance writer.