2026 CONTEST RESULTS​​​

Judge: Katherine Riegel

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Winner: "Wild Garlic" by Adam Porkolab​

 

Judge's Remarks: I’m a sucker for a powerful ending, a line that feels both utterly surprising and absolutely inevitable, something that sends me back to read the poem again so I can understand all its implications—and this poem delivers. But I also came across those types of lines throughout, finding insight and transformation to give me goosebumps: “the whole apartment turns to March,” “what survived all winter in the dark, patiently.” The poem gives us declarative lines that walk in with mud on their boots and uses the second person both to address us and to help us see ourselves more clearly. Ritual, memory, grief, appetite, and the cycle of seasons live in this poem. And that last line? Read the poem. Trust me, it’s worth it. ​

 

Read "Wild Garlic"​

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Runner-up: "Borrowed Skies" by May Garner​

 

Judge's Remarks: In “Borrowed Skies” we get an entire imagined world, one in which mirrors can slip from their hooks, drift in the river, reflect a person as they might be in the future, and hold secrets. But in addition to this original and fearless exploration of humans’ mysterious inner worlds, the poet gives us stunning images and deftly written phrases: “…winter threaded through their own hair,” “watched their mouths fill with names” “sorrow shone like wet slate beneath the surface.” Lush and tantalizing, this poem brings the subconscious to the surface in the form of a haunting fairy tale.

 

Read "Borrowed Skies"​​

 

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Runner-up: "Turbulence" by Craig White​

 

Judge's Remarks: “Turbulence” broke my heart. The only way I could read it again was because it also broke the speaker’s heart, though their actions—the killing of a wild bird—were couched in the second person, so it was as if our hearts were breaking together. Details of the natural world pull us through this child’s experience with verbs that don’t look away: steaming, plummeted, crashing, screeched, flapping, detonate, buckling, stilled, retching. And yet, as the speaker remembers this violence of childhood with guilt, the poet delivers an insight into lived experience that I keep turning over in my mind: “your memory, one-third a shadow, two-thirds a sentry.”

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Read "Turbulence"