The Hermit Poet

We are also pleased to announce that Amanda Yskamp’s poem “Not Home” was selected as the Oboh Prize / Best Poem of the Year by our external judge Rebecca Seiferle. Second place was awarded to James Owens’ “Is” and third place to Robin Halevy’s “This, Unspoken.” The winning poems were chosen from the pool of Peer Award winners and runners-up (2nd and 3rd place finishes) for 2007. The final judging was done blindly — all names were removed from the entries and were judged on their individual merit by the external judge.

1st “Not Home” – Amanda Yskamp
2nd “Is” – James Owens
3rd “This, Unspoken” – Robin Halevy

Regarding the winning poem “Not Home” by Amanda Yskamp, Rebecca wrote:

For all of its evocative phrases “carbon remnants of what she said” or the play upon ‘we were best of buds,” this poem is most compelling in its voice– wry, argumentative, shrewdly hip–and the way that voice accelerates in intensity toward closure and encounter. Beginning with “there’s a reason for this,” the voice conveys the overly determined “why” and ‘”probably why” of being reasonable, being unravelled by passion; the speaker daring, finally, to take on ‘crazy’: “I’ll show you/ crazy, I’ll show you it’s my life you’re in, not the other way around.” There’s not a moment in the poem where the poet slips out of voice, and it’s particularly crafty how the poem conflates the “you” of the she- replied-to with the ”you” of the reader.