Jane Underwood Poetry Prize

The visionary reach of “Turtle Meditations” sneaks up on the reader. Ranging across scales, from the political to the familial to the individual to the cosmological, each stanza builds upon the last until the poem culminates in a resonant mythic image. Early on, we learn that the speaker’s family, displaced by war, transfers a beloved turtle from garden to garden across generations of exile. We also soon learn that this relationship is not simple. “She is our captive and our friend,” the poet writes, “the way/everything doubles in this tiny country.” After that revelation, the poem moves toward the mysteries intrinsic in such doubleness. When the speaker revisits the family house, “a great sleepiness comes over” them and their “bones fill with rain.” Is this a memory? A dream? When they whisper the turtle’s “red name,” she returns from the dead to lumber “across the muddy yard in cycles of lift /and place, each trudge a ponder,” a resurrection that anticipates the surprising final stanza. When I first read the poem’s closure, I asked myself, “How did we get here?” and went right back to the beginning, which made me realize that this was from the start a cunningly crafted poem about “the fissured world,” always beginning and always ending. And always carried on the bloodied armored back of La Tortuga.

At first, this poem grabbed my attention with its visual elements: two columns that end up connected in the final line. As I dived into the poem, I found the interplay between the two voices of the mother and daughter a perfect complement to the form. The author reveals the narrative through subtle allusions and, at the same time, striking imagery and figurative language. Re-reading the poem multiple times gave me an appreciation of the poem’s layers and musicality. This is a haunting and profound work!

“In a womb – a new era – & Kali’s tongue” speaks so poignantly of culturally- (and therefore generationally-) embedded wounding that I feel both unsettled and encouraged by its elegiac meditation, which implicitly challenges foundational beliefs that devalue women and perpetuate their victimization. The poem’s recursive meanderings intrigue me and leave me pondering it long after its suspended, yet hopeful resolution.

The level of intimacy and memory in Sydney Vogl’s poem, “All the Bars Are Closing,” reminds us of what we long for, what we’ve left behind, and how some feelings stay with us, mapping our way home.

I’m not gonna lie: it wasn’t easy to pin one blue ribbon on a poem. But after reading and rereading and ruminating my top 5 for a few days now, I’m confident about my decision.

Given the violent dread that now seems inextricable from the everyday, “Armistice” feels like a complex reprieve. In imagining a kind of cessation, the poem enacts a momentary healing. This is perhaps the most that—beautifully, necessarily—we can hope from poetry now.

“When the women imagine their mothers in death” was so striking. It stayed with me for days.

We are delighted to award the Jane Underwood Prize to “When I Hear ‘Horses’ as ‘Corsets.’” All three of us really admire the artistry of this poem.