Kudos to beloved hermit Kim Parko (The Grotesque Child, TS 2016), who is the 2018 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest, selected by judge Mary Jo Bang.
Writes Bang:
As in fairy-tales, the landscape in these poems is an ever-turning kaleidoscopic “now”…. After reading any of these poems, one goes back in order to better understand where the so-called material world leaves off and the imaginative world begins. The glimmering narrative backstory, like the bedtime tale, tends to stay around and become a haunting. The oddity grants the reader a new set of eyes. Out of the estrangement, time, matter, language, and emotional substrate, cohere to form miniature cities that rise and fall as one goes about the day. Nothing is decided because nothing can be decided.