2025 Winners

Judges' Comments     |     Sacha Archer & Eric Schmaltz

In our current moment of political unrest, which has vaulted much of the world into great uncertainty, we, as judges, in considering these submissions, found ourselves drawn unwittingly to works that proffered some form of tactile anchoring and optimism. Each of our selections performed the strength of the individual despite chaos by reaching beyond what we might easily recognize as a poem and making their voices heard by any means necessary.

The first-place winner, “Girl Valet,” deftly combines conceptual, visual, and the aesthetics of found poetry to question the efficacy of language and the substance of the individual embedded within the virtual world of endless, vacant, and bombastic comments. Erecting a visual wall of noise by decimating line spacing, “Girl Valet” presents an extended profile of anxiety that dares the reader to stare at the mask of such language, which obfuscates the actual individual, and read it. In presenting this challenge, a weighing of value—to read or not to read? (to notice or not notice?)—”Girl Valet” simultaneously provides the necessary means of personal effacement while exposing the vulnerability of actual presence.

In an odd echo of “Girl Valet,” the second-place winner, “path Of tOtality,” also presents the reader with a form of wall (or sprawl) as a path. Taking a markedly more spiritual road, “path Of tOtality” discards our usual expectations by pivoting away from type and landing in the medium of photography to posit sculpture as text. With eclipse-like imagery imprinted onto stone, “path Of tOtality” connects the earth and cosmos, inviting us to, on the one hand, efface binaries and contemplate the harmony of seeming opposites. On the other hand, “path Of tOtality” is also ominous in its collapse of these spaces, underscored by the ambiguity of its repeated halos. Is this a piece signifying cloudless optimism, or is it a harbinger of a coming endstop? 

Finally, the third-place winner, “Cycles,” invites us into transitions of a different kind, returning us to human connection, but also that bodily connection with the landscape. Composed as a tender palindrome which employs the phrase as a unit instead of the more common units of word or letter, “Cycles” visually frames the text in the form of the sun both rising and setting (a palindromic event itself). In this three-fold mirroring of landscape, body and text, the poem enacts the revolutionary pattern cited in the title while meditating on presence and absence and, more pointedly, permanence and impermanence, anchoring it all with the centrality of care and love—an imperative for these times.