Judge Tony Barnstone’s comments: “The poem is intimate, a lyrically overheard bit of memory-thought-consciousness. At first I worried that it might be too tight, too controlled, but ultimately found myself admiring the image rhymes (eggs with melons with breasts with grapes with potatoes with bellies), the cooked-up assonance and consonance of all those great monosyllables (hold, orbs, old, eggs, choke, mud), the way roots and fertility and the difficult emotional harvest, cooking and appetite and consuming waste all interact in the semantic shadow of the poem. The poem keeps singing in the mind after you turn away from the page–a struck bell.”