Judge Tony Barnstone’s comments: “Okay, I admit it—this is a peculiar poem, rather elliptical, hard to grasp. It is so lyrical and glancing that I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in the poem. I think the poem is about a protagonist who is looking at a video of an ex-lover, or perhaps of a movie star he has a crush on. Thus, the language of the poem becomes all static and light and foolish electrons and tiny transducers and the woman who is brought to consciousness cinematically. I like the way the poem uses light to turn technology into lyricism. I enjoy certain aspects of the line breaks, as in the stanza:

I feel corners of my smirk
lift as grass to the light
syrup of Pet Sounds
with a twist of Gil Gilberto

The first line seems to stand alone, but then the next line modifies it: I feel the corners of my smirk. Then I feel them lift like grass lifts to the light. In a poem about light and electrons and the television screen, the smile lifting to the light takes on extra meaning. Then this meaning is revised by the next line: ‘light’ turns out to refer to weight—‘light / syrup of Pet Sounds /...[and] Gil Gilberto.’ So, the meaning evolves in interesting ways, and the ‘wrong’ meanings turn out to be right, part of the poem’s unfolding strategy. Cool stuff.”

Judge Tony Barnstone’s comments: “It seems that in this batch I am most attracted to elliptical, strange, lyrical poems that reference physics. Why is that? In any case, I am attracted to this poem. I’m not sure why ghosts are beautiful, or why the stories and poems are stored in the breath, or how we get from eclipses to magnetic forces to coral bubbles to clown paint, but I guess I enjoy the speed and surprise of the voyage, and I understand that all that I don’t understand is erotic shorthand, short-circuiting of meaning, and so I don’t try too hard to force it into the long circuit of the rational mind.”