Cecil Hemley Memorial Award - 2024

Kathy Fagan on C. Rees

From its first long sentence, “Crossing” establishes its story, its lyricism, and its impeccable pacing. Speaker and reader together travel this river—and the poem in fact flows and meanders, speeding and slowing in a deft use of syntax and visual effect—in non-linear time, a trashed river in a fallen world afforded Whitman-like attention and praise. I believe in this poem’s artifice and honesty, and remain shaken by its transformative final moment.

**

C. Rees (they/him) is a queer Pennsylvania-born poet, writer, and New Writers Project alumnus living in Austin, TX. Their work has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Bat City Review, Shore Poetry, Territory, the Action Books Blog, the Fairy Tale Review, the Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. Their writing excavates the intersections between trauma and disrupted landscapes, toxic masculinity and queerness, violence's contamination, memory, and complicity.

Finalist:

Elizabeth Scanlon is the Editor in Chief of The American Poetry Review. Her new book, Whosoever Whole, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in July, 2024.