Poetry
Judge's comments: These poems call on us to ask their title's question and do so with a careful, deep, located personalism. They bring us, precisely, to understand, and to begin to ask. They take us to particular moments and different stages of a young life by evoking poetic detail – “his eyebrow raising like a broken pencil” – and by placing such details in the shared time of transformative human relations – “We’d hold / hands, our thumbs brushing together, and watch / older couples doing the same.” The poems’ images seem simple, just as they are re-imagined, but also often moist and visceral as their question demands.
