Judges Peter Krok’s & Tree Riesener’s comments: “Like a zoom lens zeroing in on a scene, this poem begins with a survey of the city at a distance, seeing roofs and drains, then comes closer into a rooming house and gradually focuses on the discarded clothing of the inhabitants of the room. At each level, the environment leaps into life for the reader with the sharply-rendered details: indolent dust drifting over the roofs and drains, a bus leaning forward like an animal hunting water, heat resting in hallways, a forgotten lipstick tube opened and never closed, the language of underpants cater-cornered in a drawer, a forgotten bra hanging on a hook. The images show us, rather than tell us, that the small comfort of love possibly hoped for in the ‘squalid yellow room’ will fail, that love ‘flung like coins in the face of a beggar’ is hopeless. This poem packs a novel into its three stanzas.”