Remarks by Michal 'MJ' Jones, final judge

Poetry. Of all our written forms, it is most reminiscent of life itself—with so much to do, so much to express, with what feels like such little space and time to express it. And, depending on who and where we are born, a structured and purposeful violence may shorten our fragile lives, that already vulnerable state that we feel and write into. Life and loss, loss and life—all are the poem and the poem remembers.

And so, I wanted poems that record, that witness and record their stances of witness. Poems that disrupt empire in all its new and old forms. I wanted to be moved, to be changed, to be eroded down from surety. I wanted to be reminded of the sharp and soft edges each day can bring. I wanted to be untethered from old standards and constrictions of what poetry should be, toward what it must. I wanted to be humbled. And I was—deeply so—changed in an irrevocable sense from the words I feel deeply honored to have read.

In the late stages of "judging", I printed the poems. I needed to touch them. It was these poems that kept me or woke me from sleep, these poems that inspired me to look longer, more clearly at my son as he played, to sink into the tones of his laughter. Deep gratitude to these poets. Deep gratitude to the bravery. Deep gratitude for the refusal to silence that which must be named.

2,509 poets participated in this year's contest.

The Winners

"Cist" by Kizziah Burton
Tom Howard Prize for verse in any style
When I first encountered "Cist" on a Saturday afternoon, sun glinting into my bedroom, I wept, closed my computer, and recovered for some time, its words still etching lines of grief into me. It was, after one reading, unforgettable. The second time, then the third and fourth, I read it aloud, each time getting it caught in my throat toward the poem's devastating end. This speaker encapsulates the disbelief, transfiguration, and journey of loss that reaches right to my center: "I can't keep her from falling / so I make my body / her soft landing." The poem's etymology forces me to think about where we end and begin, what we originate from and return to. What an upending, impeccable poem. What a brave offering.

"Sestina for My Daughter" by Mikaela Hagen
Margaret Reid Prize for verse that rhymes or has a traditional style
"I knew it was finished but I couldn't stop counting." The counting, the waiting with bated breath, the hope, the fear, the fear of hope, more counting, more hoping—the poem masterfully conveys a tension sensed in the formation of the poem and the life growing inside of the speaker. Its waiting, its vulnerability, its juxtaposition of light and shadow, of infinity and unexistence—this is a writing into the form like I have rarely seen—a haunting but deeply human grief in verse.

Honorable Mentions: Tom Howard Prize

"afterimage" by F.J. Bergmann
"easy to pretend / they're not real once they vanish / afterimage"—With its panning between the snapshot of an everyday violence, and its meditative stanzas, this is a poem that ponders, when they come for the last of us, who will be left as witness?

"Migration" by Ja'net Danielo
"Migration" is a meditation. Nothing in this life is how it appears or as it should be—either due to tricks of the light or of our minds—our perception is in constant migration. "the paste & paper of imagination"—this poem questions what really exists and differentiates what exists from what matters. In reading "Migration", we can rely on this—the world of words in this poem is very real in the feelings it produces.

"my gender" by Lee Desrosiers
"my gender"—a lovely ode to the inner life that society seeks to make simple and either-or. This poem—moving and expansive as wind earth sea element—makes me breathe out of my own constrictions, breathe beyond what is expected of me. "My gender insists it runs before me and I follow"—here is a poet who allows the poem, and gender, to live its life, to flow.

"Umami" by Mary Chi-Whi Kim
In "Umami", the poet's language is flavor, magically delivering with words that which words cannot convey fully—an ancient, ancestral memory, a knowing without naming, a wisdom with no need for acknowledgement.

"rouzan" by Shereen Leanne
"Heal, sister, in the frayed history of a flag's / broken spine climbing out of the sand." Rouzan al-Najjar was a Palestinian medic killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in 2018. With "rouzan", I am reminded that ode, that eulogy, belongs to a people—our losses collective and echoing, our remembering as vital to the body of lineage as our own blood. We witness, we honor, we refuse to forget even those whose names we do not know in a grief powerful enough to shatter walls, end worlds.

"Ma'am I'm Sorry to Tell You Your Son is D—" by Darius Simpson
With a rhythm as steady as a drumline, this is a poem of refusal. The poem refuses a single death, a single, simple image, a single hashtag. The poet refuses to look away from violence—the many forms it takes in any one state-sanctioned killing of Black life—and declares that this is not just a death, it is a desecration of living. This is not just a poem, it is a promise of haunting, a guarantee.

Honorable Mentions: Margaret Reid Prize

"Oil Painting as a Form of Lying" by Maia Elsner
"the sky was / a blank answer"—In "Oil Painting as a Form of Lying", the space on the page is as noteworthy as the poem's cutting words. The chasm between the two poems here (which can be read as one, making it a true and deeply successful contrapuntal)—the gap is the before and after of a life-changing event, a gap that we cannot come back from.

"Death Sestina" by Clif Mason
"unless / nothing makes sense & nothing can"—Both declarative and pensive, both teeming and resigned to finality, "Death Sestina" explores both wondering and the end of wondering—and isn't that poetry in and of itself?

"Aubade with Lobotomized Mountain" by Maya Salameh
"in Trablos morning is on everything"—the language of this poem is so surprising that I gasped, read some more, and gasped again—it is a pristine reinvention and expansion of the aubade. Here the speaker recalls homeland while literally surrounded by the flames of a new land, remembering always the water.

"Fishhook/Anchor" by Spencer Chang
"anything can be turned into myth"—The dream sequence of "Fishhook / Anchor" is effortless and velvet. It carries the movement and fluidity of the sea, of lineage, in each word. Each stanza builds a world all its own. This is not solely memory—it is a balm.

We would like to recognize these finalists for their outstanding efforts: Partridge Boswell, Christian Collier, Carlos Gómez, Remi Recchia, Joyce Schmid, Penda Mbaye Smith, and Ziyi Yan.

See our press release about the winners

Learn more about the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest