Judge Tony Barnstone’s comments: “Usually, I find poems that use this particular bag of tricks are unsuccessful. Portmanteau words like ‘scarysexy’ are thirty years out of date now, the substitution of parts of speech for each other is an e.e. cummings trick that’s hard to imitate well, and the artificial and extreme compression that leads to a dropping of the personal pronouns seems to reek of the MFA workshop poem. So, why on earth does this poem work so well? It has a utter psychic wildness to it, a deep, archetypal vocabulary that tickles the unconscious with a knife, a relentless sexual pace, and gorgeous sounds. Maybe that’s why? I love the fact that the poet has made these old, warped arrows shoot true.”