"house in mind"

25th Annual Writing Contest Poetry Winner

by Alison Hicks

Judges Comments: Poetry

In "house in mind," Alison Hicks elides the "my" a reader expects, as in "house in my mind." With this omission, Hicks joins the conversation of Objectivist poets like George Oppen, who work from the loss of the singular, who cry out that the self collides (and colludes) with multiple personas, pronouns and bodies. Just as Oppen looked for "the meaning of being numerous," Hicks writes from and toward a self that is not a myself, but an ourself that chooses, and then finds, connections. Her movements from the natural to the domestic foreground the poem as the space where both processes and events, the materials and the things, are figured as "places to lie." In "house in mind," Hicks enacts the potential for house and forest to be both archetypes and particulars, for poems where the individual and individuality are cast aside in favor of a perspective that is not positioned as the perspective but as many perspectives that are layered and unstable. Here, the act of seeing it comes out through Hicks' stutter of saying it (wanting to or having to) and associated anxieties get into the work and the working out it proposes.

About the Judge: Michelle Taransky is the author of Barn Burned, Then. In addition to working at Kelly Writers House, she is a member of the critical writing faculty at Penn and an adjunct poetry instructor at Temple.