Honorable mentions:
1st Honorable Mention: “Jill Reaches Maturity” by Ann Magill, Ashland, OR
2nd Honorable Mention: “Once” by Sherri Levine, Portland, OR
3rd Honorable Mention: “Killjoy” by Lucy Cotter, Portland, OR
Judge’s comments
One of the things I continue to admire about the Oregon poetry community is its range in personal narratives, technique, and style. In this year’s “Members Only” category, family narratives were shuffled in with lyrically challenging poems, haiku with prose poems, and so on. This bounty of styles speaks to the health and expansiveness of Oregon poetry. In my selections, I found myself narrowing down based on what brought me closer to the page, whether that be a personal lyric rendered in such a way as to paint a clear image of a love relationship, to poems whose recasting of fictional characters in one case and whose singular take on form in another had me learning something about structure as well as joy. These poems as a whole represent gifts of voice. I am honored to have spent time with them.
—José Angel Araguz