Congrats to Sandra Stone!

The Poetry Society of America has announced it will award Sandra Stone, of Portland  Oregon the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award — given for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme. The poem, “Snow Whippets”, on the death of Alexander Litvinenko,  and  citation will be read at the ceremony, April 1st, 7PM at The National Arts Club, New York city.Judge’s citation:

For its fierceness alone – this poem merits praise. Joséf’s trembling, lyrical nakedness, Hikmet’s torn heart as he rides away on a last train, Rózevicz’s fire-eyed stare into the abyss, and Rodnoti’s smoldering and impossible love all come to mind in these six shifting, jagged stanzas. It is the shattered line, the interrupted breath-word, that give the piece its fragile forces and human strength; how it breaks away and at times collapses onto itself making for odd and caustic juxtapositions, as if confiscated and dragged away by unknown agencies. Here too, then, the fevers of Kafka –witness to a whirling world of familiar scenes, yet always “on the verge ofbeing deported.” There is one thing, however, that relieves (or consumes?) the narrator’s anguish. In the last stanza, the speaker comes to the end of the passage-way entered in the first stanza when “Suddenly afternoon turned the color of slate.” This exit is made of seeing-hearing  – it is the gaze of the exiled, “a kind of notation” of the outsider and it is atmospherically streamed by the dog-music of things, that is, the harmonics of the forever-hungers where the animal-like rush of the wild tears free. Yes, all this can happen, even if in a camp of the nameless and formless blanks of “snow.”