2025 Prize for Poetry Winners
We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, with an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to:
Alison Turner
Hollywood, California
for her poem
“No Berries on the Toyon, No Drunk Robins”
Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200, are awarded to:
Partridge Boswell
Woodstock, Vermont
for his poem “On Reading Audre Lorde at Annaghmakerrig”
Donald Levering
Santa Fe, New Mexico
for his poem “Children of Abraham and Moses”
Ingrid Wendt
Eugene, Oregon
for her poem “The Unassailable Heart”
Final judge for the 2025 Prize was poet Alicia Ostriker.
Read the winning poems below.
The 2025 Robinson JeffeRs Prize for Poetry Winning Poem
No Berries on the Toyon, No Drunk Robins
Under the mountains to the east there was a town now gone,
to the west by the sea another town gone.
Fire
Now in the next canyon heading for Hollywood Boulevard. May our house
in a grove of eucalyptus be given a reprieve. Reprieve, my phone says,
is punishment postponed, temporary relief from irrevocable harm.
*
Li the Middle Daughter
clings to what is dark and dry
Tortoise Crab Snail
the hollow art of the tree near the top
the part of the tree that is dead
So says the I Ching of fire.
*
The woman says
a cop on Sunset Boulevard yelled, Run for your lives!
and they did, abandoning their cars.
We know how to run, but not like that.
*
Checklist Go-bag Boxes by the door.
We prepare but there is no way to prepare, not really.
What does it take to make God notice you? You don't want to know, says Jesus.
*
Fire Hawks and Super Hueys churn overhead, the windows tremble, the house shudders.
We prefer noise we know to noise we don't. No sleep.
*
Is there meaning here? Ask the old woman evacuated from her home,
the body of her husband two hours dead and left behind.
*
My husband's slow familiar footsteps on the stairs, lights turning off.
*
When a fire is contained it means only that it burns with no surprises,
a kind of breaking of its spirit.
If that's what it takes. . . , I almost pray.
*
Are there known ways of dealing with the feeling that takes hold just short of fear?
*
At the evacuation center a boy draws himself standing on air, his cat is also standing on air (where is his cat in real life?) No flames he didn't see flames, but leaves and his house blowing sideways, birds blowing sideways into smoke. That's smoke, the boy explains and does not sleep, instead draws a plane with feathered wings.
Alison Turner
Alison Turner began reading and writing poetry in the 1970’s. It was not until she retired from the practice of law and found herself locked down thanks to Covid that she assembled and submitted a manuscript for her first full collection—The Second Split Between. It was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2021 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Hudson Review, Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Catamaran, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Street Press 2020), Poetry Goes to the Movies(Beyond Baroque Books 2025), and Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press 2025). She lives with her husband in Los Angeles under the Hollywood sign.
2025 Honorable Mentions
ON READING AUDRE LORDE AT ANNAGHMAKERRIG
I feel, therefore I can be free--Audre Lorde
Wading through dew-wet whins, briar sedge, asphodel & bracken
you near the water's edge, not to cast yet another line of pickup,
punch or aspersion, but to write your confession: that you've learned
everything worth burning from wombsong--which, if air could speak,
translates to life's inner flame rising in its raising--and fold it in
a paper boat you set ablaze / afloat for an atavistic world to envision
not as symbol but necessity. You expect an uneventful crossing
yet here on shore how can one judge the size of capsizing whitecap
selfies, humblebrag and rants, the flotillas of slipped straws?
No telescope does it justice. You scale saltchuck down to puddle,
shake a snow globe full of rain instead of plastic. Call the lough
a lake, whatever familiar your body swims in, that ancient,
fatherless vessel. Through vision's dimming corner-slit
you fathom askance the well of all wishes--granted to be
reclaimed at the end of the line when day's fisheye dilates
and gulps. Across a shirred letter-littered surface too equivocal
to wound into words your fugitive fire drifts further, further...
bright as a Vedic pyre, its saturated ash shifting to the floor.
All your life, fooled by a thirst no water will quench, you stand
on the bank of one more silence to be broken and say again: Poetry
is not a luxury...it's our first and last line of defense, our birthright
against the storm, the light by which we form and scatter our magic.
Partridge Boswell
Author of the 2024 Fool for Poetry Prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House and Grolier Poetry Prize-winning collection Some Far Country, Partridge Boswell is co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival and teaches at Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal. He troubadours widely with the bard band Los Lorcas, who will be touring Ireland in support of their new album Wild Island in June 2025. https://loslorcas.com/
CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM AND MOSES
Why war with our brothers
who also spurn pork and love soccer
On both sides fig butter lovers
spooners of apricot jam
In both places kind eyed aunts and joking uncles
In one neighborhood a talkative barber
In the other a loquacious butcher
Here and there schools study scripture
written right to left
giving praise to the Maker
Pita and chickpeas
prepared there and here
Desserts sweetened with dates in both places
The fragrance of olive tree blossoms
wafts across fences
both ways through drying laundry
Here and there a rash
of youthful funerals
Wailing on both sides of the wall
On either side marrow-deep grief
On both sides those who assert
revenge is their only relief
Presidents whose glory
marches on amputated legs
Prime Ministers whose pride
is a coffin parade
Ruler beholden
to munitions merchants
Leaders whose retribution
is an endless loop of wounding
Generations hexed with grievance
inoculated with taunt and slur
Which heaven is reserved
for those who turn buses
into smoking vessels of hellfire
Which eternal power
declines to deflect the sniper
or hobble the kidnapper
What infinite justice winks
at killers who think they are martyrs
at uniformed murderers following orders
Whose lord gives blessing
to the shelling of hospitals
or raping of hostages
Which Creator writes the recipe
for man-made famine
or spreading contagion
Under sesame seed stars
Under the gleaming crescent
Under blue mosaic octagons
your sloughed shoes wait for you
on paisley carpets
O holy day faster
Under the twinkling hexagon
O ritual feaster
the candlelit glass waits to be raised
In the prayers you both murmur
In the refuge of the honey-voiced cantor
In the muezzin’s call of the dusk and the dawn
Inshallah and Amen|
Amen and Inshallah
O veiled mourners
Whose hosannas will be heard
above the air-raid sirens
To whose beseechment
does the Lord listen
To whose weeping
Whose children are to be buried
in hallowed ground
Whose in anonymous rubble
Which commandment do we heed--
to divide our kindness by tribe
or to offer comfort to refugees
At whose hearth dwells the God
of Abraham and Moses
At whose table
may enemies break bread
Donald Levering
Former NEA Fellow Donald Levering was born in Kansas City and grew up there and in Oceanside, New York. Among his writing honors are winner of the 2018 Carve Poetry Contest and the 2017 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry. His 16th and most recent book, Breaking Down Familiar, placed 2nd in the National Federation of Press Women's Creative Verse Contest. Garrison Keillor has featured Levering’s work in his “Writer’s Almanac” podcast. Levering’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Columbia, Commonweal, Hiram Poetry Review, Hollins Critic, Hunger Mountain, Poet & Critic, Southern Poetry Review, Stand, Terrain.org, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He lives in Santa Fe, where he co-curates the HERE Gallery’s poetry series, and volunteers as a US citizenship tutor and a driver for Kitchen Angels.
THE UNASSAILABLE HEART
When, after three weeks mostly in bed (except when I wasn't
Learning to stand on my own, and then to step with a walker, and then
With cane: to put one undependable foot in front of the other, to navigate
Under the strictest supervision, all those long, too-shiny halls)
When, after weeks of meals with patients whose brains, like mine, were swollen
Whose very essence had been exposed, if not by the nimble
Fingers of surgeons, then by the Judas of their own dear bodies
When, after night on endless night at the beck and call of my vital signs
And the constant need of the constantly-shifting staff to read them
Allowing me two hours of sleep at a time, unable to dream
When, after one small part of the self I used to be crept into the room, looking
For the long-lost garden of song, and asked for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem
After Placido Domingo’s "Hosanna" nightly, through earphones, filled to over-
Flowing that vast, newly opened space at the base of my skull
Just when I knew for sure I needed nothing more, a volunteer
Wheeled me out the door and into
A campus green enfolded in the giant red blossoms of rhododendron.
Tears--that for so many years had been inaccessible, not even
When one of my best friends died--tears, all on their own, started to rise
(Hosanna) spilled over (Hosanna), in tune with every newly-
Opened cell of my soul, in tune with blossoms praising the ever-lengthening sun.
And I, certain as never before of what someday lies ahead
Knew also what lay behind: the tomb of the unassailable heart.
Qui venit in nomine Domini. Tell me. What am I to do with so much love?
Ingrid Wendt
Ingrid Wendt is the author of five full-length books of poems. The first, Moving the House was chosen for BOA Editions by William Stafford, who wrote the introduction. She has co-edited two anthologies and has taught at all educational levels, including the Antioch, L.A., MFA program and as a three-time Senior Fulbright professor in Germany. Honors include the Oregon Book Award, the Editions Prize, the Carolyn Kizer Award, four Pushcart nominations, and several features on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” Recent poems appear in Poetry, About Place, Calyx, APR, Terrain, Tikkun, and River Heron Review, where she was one of four finalists in the 2024 Editors Prize. Trained as a classical pianist and organist and married for 48 years to the late poet and writer Ralph Salisbury, Ingrid sings with the Eugene (Oregon) Concert Choir and volunteers as an exhibit interpreter at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. A grateful survivor of brain surgery, which removed the benign meningioma which had been stealthily compromising her physical, mental, and emotional balance for far too long, she is also grateful for the healthy distance of many years which allowed her to write this poem. For more, see https://ingridwendt.com