Judge's comments: Here is a soft touch, a tender toss into the truncating vernacular of an America unseen. So soft a touch in fact it may be said to never have happened (to history which cannot write what it refuses to see / what falters before and after the witness). But those who’ve felt it, the poet especially, know the ghostly familiar that reaches backward in time to remind us we are still here and for a reason—an answer to the prayer we hadn’t realized we were praying all along. And what the vernacular elides in and of a grammar of violence, we feel here whispered by the mother of your mother: they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.

It is the divine maternal defiance of terrestrial death that calls us here to keep going. Keep going. To hold fast and bathe (us) in the pleasures and pains of our own precious bodies while we’re alive, while we’re here. Here. Because “we ain’t die to keep on / dying and baby you ain’t / dead yet.”

That’s all we really need to know to do what needs doing, to live the way they’d have wanted us to live, to honor their lives and those to come. This poem is everything.

Judge's comments: “AUXOCHROME” bubbles with joy and wonder, starting in its title, and wending through “serendipity’s tree,” to “blue loafers/calling to Houston,” to a time capsule that might hatch a kiss in the past, to vodka collecting in clavicles when a speaker or an addressee insists “upon being a vessel.” Finally, the speaker has a strong desire to “tongue heavy/smatters of gauche” [sic] (maybe gouache?), and I am right there licking the painting’s surface with them. Wonderful!

Judge's comments: These poems are full of moments of great depth and movement at once, as in:

“Dehiscence/starlight folded into/the middle layers/hands//full of stone/ a proto absence/absence escaped//Loosening my legs//over the coals I sat//down and wept.”

These lines pack themselves with beauty and grief and mystery, and relay a sense of knowing and unknowing that makes a road through the dust of history, into the future.

Judge's comments: This year's entries for the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award were extraordinary, and served, indeed, to celebrate life, which made it very difficult for this reader to choose anything like "winners" amongst them. By way of honoring, I'd mention: post-O'Haran intersectional persons vividly touched; careful, institutionally implicated, poetic building in our own locale; sweet-bitter lemonade everything and everywhere; and sonnets that are absolutely and also not sonnets because they are so, o, real.

But, of necessity and with great pleasure, this reader singles out 'Lighthouse' as a piece of writing that performs beautifully – that is, it both is and becomes a poem – as its words turn lighthouse, at the end of a shared last day, and language takes us to a place where "there will be more planets, / each with its own set of seasons." It was the way words and images "turn" or have "turned" in this poem – historically, and without gerunding – at the edge of an intense, all-but-conventional lyricism that took the world of this writing just far enough beyond our own, in small steps that pressed its lighthouse into the earth and "pushed the sky further and further away" so that this reader could see something, and turn to hear a voice.

And this reader's other selection was 'Catching Fish with Two Hands' + 'A List of Herbs I Want You to Taste in my Mind in another Language'. The title of the second piece was almost enough for this reader because this reader wants, as soon as possible, to taste a list of herbs in your mind in another language. The poem itself more or less satisfied a commensurate desire but first, let's catch some fish. The latter poem seemed, at first, to risk the inconsequentiality of poeticized minimal observations or sequential non sequiturs and yet it yielded just enough personal address – that shifting ambiguous second person as well as an underlying lyric 'I' – to catch this reader in a couple of hands, while some of the gnomic fragments proved perfect verses "Liquids have it easy / inside a shape" with liquid also offering the flow of poetic narrative, "My water is sometimes thin" ... "Watching the river / melt" and, after all, it is the shape of water that summons the affect, "When a rainbow arrives / I am always surprised". Then, the poem whose title this reader took so much anticipated pleasure in, this poem also delivers in terms of a marvelous personal journey through poetic thought and through thoughts of other language. This reader doesn't want to tell other potential future readers anything more about a journey that I do very much recommend that they should take because, in the words of the poem's last line, "How do you know you want something you've never tasted?"

Judge's comments: This year's entries for the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award were extraordinary, and served, indeed, to celebrate life, which made it very difficult for this reader to choose anything like "winners" amongst them. By way of honoring, I'd mention: post-O'Haran intersectional persons vividly touched; careful, institutionally implicated, poetic building in our own locale; sweet-bitter lemonade everything and everywhere; and sonnets that are absolutely and also not sonnets because they are so, o, real.

But, of necessity and with great pleasure, this reader singles out 'Lighthouse' as a piece of writing that performs beautifully – that is, it both is and becomes a poem – as its words turn lighthouse, at the end of a shared last day, and language takes us to a place where "there will be more planets, / each with its own set of seasons." It was the way words and images "turn" or have "turned" in this poem – historically, and without gerunding – at the edge of an intense, all-but-conventional lyricism that took the world of this writing just far enough beyond our own, in small steps that pressed its lighthouse into the earth and "pushed the sky further and further away" so that this reader could see something, and turn to hear a voice.

And this reader's other selection was 'Catching Fish with Two Hands' + 'A List of Herbs I Want You to Taste in my Mind in another Language'. The title of the second piece was almost enough for this reader because this reader wants, as soon as possible, to taste a list of herbs in your mind in another language. The poem itself more or less satisfied a commensurate desire but first, let's catch some fish. The latter poem seemed, at first, to risk the inconsequentiality of poeticized minimal observations or sequential non sequiturs and yet it yielded just enough personal address – that shifting ambiguous second person as well as an underlying lyric 'I' – to catch this reader in a couple of hands, while some of the gnomic fragments proved perfect verses "Liquids have it easy / inside a shape" with liquid also offering the flow of poetic narrative, "My water is sometimes thin" ... "Watching the river / melt" and, after all, it is the shape of water that summons the affect, "When a rainbow arrives / I am always surprised". Then, the poem whose title this reader took so much anticipated pleasure in, this poem also delivers in terms of a marvelous personal journey through poetic thought and through thoughts of other language. This reader doesn't want to tell other potential future readers anything more about a journey that I do very much recommend that they should take because, in the words of the poem's last line, "How do you know you want something you've never tasted?"

Judge's comments: After his friend Nick Gomez-Hall died in the Oakland Ghost Ship fire, Mark Baumer composed a series of blog entries and poems about crying, which I felt called to reread after listening to "All these tears got to be going somewhere," a multimodal poem that collates forms and materials—hand drawings of bodies with text inside them ("It's everywhere / Where is it?"; "SAVE US"), xeroxed palms, and collaged magazine cuttings—to articulate a deeply specific yet nebulous "THIS." That THIS is at once HIV/AIDS, pregnancy, mental illness, and the experience of being a black body under perpetual siege: life with THIS living death. Albeit disparate, Mark's voice and the author's voice feel connected, and illuminate each another. In a poem called "microphone tears," composed on December 6, 2016, Mark wrote: Have you ever / done / freedom / by / crying / into a microphone / until / the only song / allowed / on the radio / is people crying / into microphones? In "All these tears got to be going somewhere," the author archives Jet's Top 20 Albums from 1993 (Janet Jackson, Luther Vandross, Bobby Brown) while crying into the mic—the page—thereby transmuting an endless grief into a fecund form of protest. Doing freedom, the poem sings, delivering catharsis. Simultaneously, it performs self-reflexive headstands: SONGS AND POEMS NEEDED *TO BE SET TO MUSIC*, a cut-and-pasted advertisement reads. YOUR SONGS OR POEMS MAY EARN MONEY FOR YOU. SEND POEMS OR SONGS FOR FREE EXAMINATION! With this gesture, the poem becomes both a speculative ticket to freedom and an infected body under investigation, wherein "doctor's a two legged dog [...] not even trying to do / something bout it / [...] cat's got more brains than him."

Mark also wrote on December 6, 2016 that It should be more socially acceptable to cry in front of large corporations. Writes the author of "All these tears...": "need that money that white money / need that white money to be seen." The poem meditates on Arthur Ashe and Magic Johnson's class privileges while a headline about AIDS on Ebony Magazine's cover is juxtaposed with the news of MC Hammer's new $20 million home. "They got that white money / they'll live forever," the speaker (the singer) declares before asking a psychic whether she's going to die. But the psychic can't find her life line; and she also wants money the singer doesn't have—"gimme 10 / and i'll try and find it again," she says. 

I am thinking now of the late poet C.D. Wright, who wrote that "We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate."

As I spent time getting to know "All these tears got to be going somewhere," my mind kept returning to how, after he almost got expelled from college for writing the only article he ever wrote for his school newspaper, Mark started a zine called G.M.B.O. That zine was an act of journalism, of revolt. My heart selected this poem for The Mark Baumer Prize for Language Art not only for its intuitive craft and emotional depth, but also because it too is an act of journalism: the author gathers; she analyzes; she participates in political community. In doing so, she delivers a life line. She rises.

Judge's comments: “The Buoy” is a thrill. First, we get an expertly-paced manual for living, complete with diagrams. Then, the story of a person trying to make sense of their life using those diagrams. But the map is incomplete. People, it turns out, are a mess. And yet we still try to make sense of them. And make meaning with them. We can’t help it. I read “The Buoy” in one heartbreaking blast. I thought: I’ve never read anything like this. And then: I’ve rarely felt anything so true. A prize-winning combo, to be sure. Mark would have loved “The Buoy’s” bravery, its wonderful drawings, it's very many nested footnotes, and frankly, its length. It is easy to imagine Mark screaming across a basketball court and dunking the large manuscript— to the sound of its well-earned applause.

Judge's comments: As the fiction machine that is “The Husband Machine” works its intricate wonders, cigarette smoke harpoons through the empyrean, and we ponder the exact intermingling of air within the lungs of white storks, while The Outlaw Josey Wales daggers over the faces of reclined parents. With useful echoes of the Ben Marcus of The Age of Wire and String or Notable American Women, and Magdalena Tully’s Dreams and Stones, but with textures, cadences and realizations all its own, “The Husband Machine” takes on yearning, love and love’s speedy, messy dismantling with crackling assiduity and shimmering aplomb. I loved the weave of inevitability and surprise here. The whole was well-wrought. It felt like sturdy cloth.

Judge's comments: I thought, frequently, of Rikki Ducornet’s The Monstrous and the Marvelous, that wild compendium of care, curse and frequent surprise, as I journeyed deep into the humming depths of “my dad is housed inside a whale”. Everywhere in this work — which echoes, for its poignant luminosity and joyousness, A House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and, for its sharp, hard smartness, The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom — the denizens of the deep zoo of the imagination are caught and released, as language does backflips while twirling bright batons: “outside, a narwhal’s tooth erupts through soft lips where flesh-eating shrimps will cling to the pink to a mosaic hoop, mouthing, or else someone else’s mouth.” “my dad is housed inside a whale” feels like the start of an exciting voyage. It is also a destination: a small, strange wonder cabinet of a country.  I recommend a visit.

Judge's comments: The creator of this work has shared something significant: in writing disembodied voices they have given readers a concrete understanding of death, remorse and grief — and perhaps most importantly — a glimpse into the adventitious origins of narrative's origins in prose, verse and song.

Judge's comments: Voice is authentic, and setting is assured — but what truly distinguishes this work is its capacity to recognize and casually work to re-set the boundaries of a form. In this sophisticated literary work we see the police used as tensile framework for a complex construction made of the uncanny, fantastic and surreal.

Judge's comments: “Taz Tries for the Top”, an illustrated work, falls into the tradition of the quest/adventure. The protagonist, a tapir named Taz, seeks to move up from the rain forest's ground to reach the top of the canopy so as to finally gain an unfiltered, direct view of the sun. Along the way up, Taz encounters a series of other animals as well as two birds, all of whom provide a helping "hand." These efforts eventually leave Taz no closer to the goal -- so, through self-reliance, Taz redoubles the efforts and makes the journey up through diligence; and so upon reaching the goal, finds much wonder (mixed with a bit of concern about what comes next). The story is unrushed and gentle, carrying the reader with Taz toward an understanding of the value of friends and the value of perseverance -- but even more so, the joys of pursuing imagination's delights.

Judge's comments: In highly evocative play between image and text, this manuscript accumulated a moving and stunning story — though it defies genre in many ways as well. It's a lament, a song — cycle, a work of almost puppetry on the page — the lively use of dynamics of space and text — the layering of images and repetitions of words — this piece continued to surprise me with new variations, even as deepenings continued toward the final ghosted handprints.

Judge's comments: New strategies of storytelling are explored in "my teeth." And yes, teeth, and the implications, memories, dreams inspired by teeth are the presiding image in this refracted, prismatic and patterned work. Gaps between title and text, fissures in narrative, and language/meaning gaps provide a fecund space in which to experiment. An enigmatic, original and still unfolding project filled with potential, and strangeness: "winter word Drink milk from a cow, and bones will grow strong. The enamel's white sheen will glisten all shiny, just like a Christmas tree.."

Judge's comments: There is the man in the station. There is the evidence.  There is Egon Schiele moving through, haunted and gaunt.  There is wreckage and witness.  There is something at once so tough-minded and sophisticated, and so vulnerable, something so complex and nuanced, and something so elemental. he/they/ you/that/ i is a poignant and disturbing work, a meditation in writing on what in the end can be written, traversing the stations of the psyche as it struggles using a variety of narrative and poetic strategies to survive.  Resisting simplicity and closure, it is powerful and troubling work that remains with the reader long after the last page.

Judge's comments: An astonishing and accomplished manuscript that combines memoir and fiction -- both written in a poetic/associative mode -- as well as a number of interspersed registers: humor, research, dialogue, history, meditation. The subject is a complex excavation based on a grandmother's diary, but the themes extend far into global affairs, especially in Poland, and the aftermath of WW2 -- its silences, diasporas, and the experience of many different people who had their lives invaded, overturned, ended. The manuscript is both entertaining and very poignant, and a fluid and unique work. 

Judge's comments: “The Board and the Complex” features a thrilling commitment to collectivity, to the art of portraiture trained on community as a whole (instead of upon a single rugged individualist); a powerful ethical vision of right and wrong uses of political power; a sharp and keenly entertaining tragicomedy; and a sterling syntactical confidence. Rarely is an idea of what the novel can do, how ambitious it can be, how malleably it can perform, so completely understood in a first extended work. Indeed, it’s possible to liken this chapter to some of the finest first novels of the last generation without risk of overstating the case. This is work we are all lucky to bear witness to at the moment of its germination.

Judge's comments: “Bioceremonials” fuses together a keen understanding of hybrid activity in contemporary prose writing (though its concerns are not only with prose, but also with diagram, and prose poem, and spell, and alchemical treatise), with some very current and topical considerations of ecology and theory, with a result that exceeds each of these forms, by making more of the assemblage than of its constituent elements. There are thrilling moments of storytelling here, there are revelations of the self, and there are apt and important articulations of how theory can open the field to new ways of thinking about subjectivity and time and science and narrativity. Also, there’s a lot of Indiana here, depicted with great sympathy and comedy. This manuscript causes one to think, but is also extremely moving, and develops, despite its variety of containers, as compellingly as might a symphony. This is work that is self-assured, dazzling, and new. 

Judge's comments: I am impressed with this poet’s sonic sense and clear instinct for line breaks, which together result in a sophisticated balance of texture and tempo. Each poem is a small ecology of detail, contained with shifting contents. Many lines surprised and lingered with me: After the wreck, the lady of the house / wants an 8-day brass movement…” and “if the orange / shirt emits a head, what kind of cartoon birds fly out?” and “the Yarkon and the Charles, their mixing / with the ocean at the mouth.” I also appreciated the conversation with other texts and firm location in our global political moment. I look forward to seeing more of this poet’s work in the world.

Judge's comments: I’m struck by the peculiar type of immediacy in these haunting poems. Patently concerned with form, with framing devices and their own making, they teem with life and its contemporary correlatives: toxicity, decay, violence. Queer desire and abjection run through them as if unfiltered, raw. Odd juxtapositions keep me returning to them: “Still Life, Orchestra” is a brilliant arrangement of captivating visual and auditory images that are almost ordinary, yet are transmuted into objects of contemplation by the attention the speaker bestows on them. Menace looms large; the poems, knowingly, offer only provisional respite: “ignorance: what is beyond the barbed wire.” Yet their edges are porous. We’re in America’s here and now (“here comes the random/mass shooter”), where people’s behavior is as determined by virtuous aspirations as by the pressures of call-out culture (“I/had sat by a man/who looked not good/in not good clothes, /to prove my anti-racism”), and then elsewhere, where desire, perhaps, escapes monitoring and commodification: “Friday. Praise Allah and liquor. /Young men are giving free motorcycle rides/to lost queers.” Where is the poem’s edge if it’s elastic enough to include a reader’s commentary on its own imagery? “‘I like the part about pissing,’ he said. […] Then: there was pissing.” The precarious pleasure of pleasing others meets the sting of Eros in “Erotic Slap,” where the smacks on the body-cum-merch (“McLips McZits”) come from all directions: “some hate to make sure we don’t love.” Love and cruelty are curious, if not surprising, bedfellows, and these poems stun in their courage to lie between both.

Judge's comments:

Judge's comments: There are many lines that stopped me with pleasure and made me think, e.g. "the sum of all shadows you cast equals the weight of light." The weight of light, of bodies, of words is pitched against weighty themes like war, trauma, statelessness, and especially being between. Between states, languages, even scripts (Latin and Cyrillic), enacted by increasing appearance of lines in Serbo-Croatian, by the sequence moving between long, rushing, not quite grammatical prose lines and broken up, even syncopated verse. But it is the sheer pleasure of the language, the startling use of abstractions, the dance of the intellect among words that enchants.

Judge's comments: These poems are grounded in the thick shifts of soil that nourish us all – humans, animals, and ghosts – in a deft language that can be measured and contemplative, or gently framed in layers of physicality that peel, press, and touch – at times tenderly, at times congealing in an ominous undergrowth. Time and space have a precarious conflation: and so it is for the “lonely duck in evaporating puddle.” These supple poems invite meditation, delight, and empathy.