Judge Tony Barnstone’s comments: “I was engaged by this character who wakes in the waste of daylight in her sooty dress, partied out, smoked over, yet dreams herself a firefly leaving the city lights to be a light in the country, caught in the chapel of a child’s cupped hands, a star falling to her at night, a fairy wish. Better that than to be a damselfly, ‘self-involved / and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds.’ It’s magical, and utterly romantic, or more accurately, Romantic, in its division of life into innocence and experience, country and city, childhood and adulthood. As a critic I read back in grad school said, ‘Romantic poetry is a long walk into the sublime, and a short walk back.’ Who can really write a Romantic poem today and get away with it? Something about this poem’s assured movement, its magical images, its tenderness, allows me to like it, because there will always be a Romantic in poetry, and the only question is the one that the moderns (especially Frost, Williams, Yeats, and Stevens) posed themselves: how to renew the Romantic impulse in a world in which the machines have won and the country has retreated to city parks and potted plants?”

Poem of the Year Judge Xeufei Jin’s comments: “A very imaginative poem. Though personification is a trite device, this poem manages to become intimate, dramatic, and wise.”