Award Winners
Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award - 2025
Alisha Dietzman
XOXO and XOXO (CODA)
XOXO
“Always” means “Eternally.”
Texaco stations
of the cross.
Highway. Hotel
room like a room
unlike any other room.
Tissue dispenser built-in:
chrome/saliva, strangely
beautiful. You,
watching aliens.
The rule is simple: to enter into the poem—not in order to know what it means, but rather to think what happens in it. Because the poem is an operation, it is also an event. The poem takes place. The superficial enigma points to this taking place. It offers us a taking place in language. – Badiou
XOXO (CODA)
Done, and gone.
My father saying
done gone/gone and done.
Dun is a gone color.
Gun dawn, shock red,
silver-shot.
I have always been,
some might say,
running.
Cynthia Cruz on Alisha Dietzman
Upon reading the poems in this collection, I was rendered speechless. The poems are, as Lucie Brock-Broido writes in her poem, “Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements” describing the state she is reduced to after a world-altering event, “breathtakingly awkward and alive.” Which is to say: the poems are libidinally invested [“alive”] while saying the thing that must not be said [“breathtakingly awkward”]. These are poems that seem as though they had to be written; that the writer was driven to write them. A message in a bottle. The poems are condensed, compressed to their bare essence. What remains is potency, the substance of lived life. In, for example, this excerpt from the poem, “XOXO,” one in a series of the same title:
Texaco stations
of the cross.
Highway. Hotel
room like a room
unlike any other room.
Beneath the above poem, the poet includes a citation by the philosopher Alain Badiou, which, I think, may better articulate the work: “The rule is simple: to enter into the poem—not in order to know what it means, but rather to think what happens in it. Because the poem is an operation, it is also an event. The poem takes place. The superficial enigma points to this taking place. It offers us a taking place in language.“
These poems do not attempt to say or show anything. Rather, they are the thing, the “event,” the “operation.” And though they do not tell or show us anything, they, nonetheless, illuminate something about the world we live in—this moment of historical rupture—and this is precisely why they render us speechless.
**
Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon Press, 2023), selected by Victoria Chang for the National Poetry Series. A finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Oregon Book Awards, Sweet Movie was also shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Slow Motion Something For No Reason, received the Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editors’ Choice Award (Factory Hollow Press, 2022). She received her PhD in Divinity with a focus on aesthetics and ethics from the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US–UK Fulbright Commission. Her creative and critical work has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rebecca Swift Foundation, the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Raised between Prague, Czechia, and Columbia, South Carolina, she now lives in Oregon.