2003 Poetry Advisory Committee: Bonnie MacEwan, William Brockman, William Joyce, Gabriel Welsch, Steven Herb
2003 Poetry Selection Committee: Robin Becker, Harry Humes, Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Poster Design and Artwork: Marla Jaksch, Erik Brandt
2003 Poetry Advisory Committee: Bonnie MacEwan, William Brockman, William Joyce, Gabriel Welsch, Steven Herb
2003 Poetry Selection Committee: Robin Becker, Harry Humes, Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Poster Design and Artwork: Marla Jaksch, Erik Brandt
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s “Moon-Grief Utterance #2 (for SP)” links the mystery of another world to breath, to sadness coming from elsewhere to the ear of a lover. The imaginative leap here makes the most of poetry’s compressed form.
Constance Levy’s “Plink by Plink” sounds like the very place the poem describes. Every tick, drop, and rock, each sound of icicle and liquid lingering, recreate the aural reality of the cave.
Maxine Kumin’s “Sisyphus” reminds us, vividly, how the smallest incidental can make in us a burden
Paul Martin’s “The Delicate Boat” leaves few who read it with the ability to look again at ribs, at the dip of the abdomen, and not see the “delicate boat,” to not recall this moving depiction of brotherhood and grief.
Elaine Terranova’s “The River Bathers” purposely buries its move toward a moral in the poem’s center, following it only with oddity, certain detail cast in relief against an uncertainty of feeling, and the oddity of a world newly understood.