Current & Past Recipients

“This poet brings curiosity, immediacy, humor and wistfulness to poems that range widely but are consistently achingly human. A ‘Connecticut Vision’ arises from a visit to Cosco; ‘More Is Thy Due’ from a biographer’s misunderstanding of a quote from MacBeth; and ‘Maternal Landscape with Flight and Chase’ from Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. 

Motherhood and family life provoke ringing discoveries, as in ‘Tonic Reflex’:

            For years I imagined Death

            in his greatcoat , peeling

            a withered orange

            or gargling with snow.

            Then I became a mother.

In ‘We Light a Candle,’ a family ceremony to mark the anniversary of a neighbor boy’s suicide is deftly braided with their disappointment when a monarch caterpillar’s chrysalis is unable to ‘successfully hang itself,’ sparking the speaker to recall “pregnancy, when the body protects without help from the mind.”

‘Girl Walking Uphill in Darkness’ provides a glimpse of the speaker in her youth: ‘dear diary what was your first cell’ and ‘dear diary I want to talk about metempsychosis’—and also serves to highlight the poet’s refreshing propensity for the unexpected. I could listen to this voice all day long.” 

Of second finalist, poet Suzanne Langlois, Watson writes:

”I was immediately wowed by this manuscript’s opener, ‘Self Portrait as an Egg,’ including its startling first line ‘I wear my largest bone on the outside’— and, well, by the whole damn poem.

Next we get yet another barn-burner—the sonnet ‘Natural Habitat.’ Carefully wrought, employing every sort of music (assonance, alliteration, pace and rhythmic shifts, rhyme and off-rhyme), the poem manages to feel wonderfully free and spontaneous as it delivers us to the speaker’s early self-defining aversion to the ‘bright yard,’ and even to the wood’s edge where ‘ferns performed their backbends’:

            I preferred the dappled light, the soggy ground.

            Like the others living half-submerged,

            I wanted most not to be easily found.

‘Self Portrait as a Hermit Crab’ and ‘Self Portrait as a Turtle’ both strike me as little miracles in the way that pathos and playfulness are devastating but somehow endearing—drawing me closer rather than pushing me away. And it helps that our speaker also directs her humor and brave gaze in an outward direction, as in ‘Unnatural Selection,’ a poem about drones:

            We are sentenced to our own worst inventions—

            the lute, jello molds, marriage, and now,

            metal insects…

This poet has much to teach us, and knows how to work an extended metaphor to glory rather than strangulation. What an image-maker, what a truth-teller!”