2024 Prize for Poetry Winners
PLACEHOLDER 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.