Comments by judge Elena Karina Byrne: “The title ‘deliquesce’ is the verb form of a scientific term for minerals (especially salts) that ‘have a strong affinity for moisture,’ so the poem re-enacts an alchemy that transforms this kind of affinity, an intimate experience where language and image fold into one another in a liquid-like solution of surrealistic transference. ‘Deliquesce’ plays on linguistic expectations and delights in a fall-out of images where ‘the door is a yes,’ the ‘yes’ that Wallace Stevens once said, ‘the future world depends,’ and here, where the very nature of sight is also a process of feeling upon which we depend.”