2023 Award Winner
The Pear Tree: an elegy for a farm by Bethany Reid

Judge’s note: The Pear Tree, an elegy for a farm is an elegant, sensory, satisfying collection of poems. Even in this nostalgic location, “chickens have to be fed, necks wrung” and still it is a place of “such good work.” Beauty and grief abound in nearly equal measure between remembered notes of “creeksong, birdsong, rain on leaves,” for “if a field of sorrow, another of joy.”

 

Runner Up

To Walk the North Direction

 

Ciel Motai Downing

 

Judge’s note: Redemption emerges from an early deep connection with nature that is re-embraced after a life fraught with sexual abuse, exposure to toxins of many kinds during military service, and brutal work environments.

 

Sue Fagalde Lick
Vivian Faith Prescott
Donna Prinzmetal
Sarah Stockton
Jill McCabe Johnson

Finalists

Bully Wind
Divination of Salmon
Inflorescence
The Scarecrow of My Former Self
Tangled in Vow & Beseech

 

 

Deirdre Lockwood
Laton Carter
Jessica Barksdale
Joseph Powell
Joannie Stangeland
Richard Widerkehr
Lois Parker Edstrom
J.I. Kleinberg

Honorable Mention

An Introduction to Error
Annotated Creatures
Cookies with Ghosts
Earthen Voices
House of Dream and Then
Missing the Owl
A Quiet Tune
A Trajectory of Shadows

 

MoonPath Press is an imprint of Concrete Wolf