It is our honor to announce the winner of the 13th Annual Coniston Prize: Cara Waterfall. Here is what our distinguished judge had to say about Cara’s series of poems, Afterlives:
Afterlives opens with the poet's desire for the bloom/ beneath the visible world, through a consciousness as mutable as the shimmer and collapse of medusae. In these five beautiful lyric poems, that bloom appears and reappears: a bronze key/estranged from its lock, a hospital ward that hovers/between mint/and extinction. In an ordinary kitchen, there is salt brighter than marble and the violet husks/of garlic are whispering against the floorboards. Most astonishing is the laundromat, where the washers are borrowed moons// Shirts orbit and a cloth becomes the interval/between flower/and shroud. Each of these poems accomplishes an enchantment of the ordinary world, through the alchemy of mind and image. It is not often that one encounters poetry that expresses wonderment with such subtlety and grace.
—Carolyn Forché
With a record number of submissions for this year’s prize, we knew that we had our work cut out for us. Then we began to read the poems, which had arrived from nearly every corner of the world, and we realized that the competition had become downright fierce.
The quality of this year’s submissions to The Coniston Prize, by and large, rendered us stunned. Never before had we read so much great poetry during one submission period. And never before had we faced the nearly impossible task of choosing a small group of finalists. We acknowledge every poet who submitted, thank you for trusting us with your poems, and admire a great many of the poems we read this time around.
Each of our finalists possesses a singular voice. Each is unforgettable for her precision, whether the poems examine a landscape, address family history, meditate on illness and grief, or hold the experience of a being a woman to the light. Taken as a whole, these are poems of resistance, inheritance, affirmation, and survival. They are intimate, ambitious poems of witness and beautiful testaments to our own deeply-held belief that paying attention is the key to great poetry.
—Rachel Marie Patterson and Dara-Lyn Shrager, Editors