Award Winners
George Bogin Memorial Award - 2025
Migwi Mwangi
Finalists
Rob Macaisa Colgate
Jess Yuan
Contrasuture
First time I hear English in your mouth, you burn
with the smell of illicit brews, chopped kale and
three overripe tomatoes in a polythene bag between
your left rib and patched elbows.
Hours after English takes your mouth, word arrives of
municipal bulldozers lined to hole our beaten rooms.
Camouflaged officers, their wet loot of blood-red paint
marking houses for demolition, room for new police posts.
Your arthritic hands swollen just as well from
twisting a stable mattress-and-furniture origami
ligatured by your strict leather waist-braid, hauled into
the cheap flight of air by your hard school of obedience.
And a while later, I watched you, flickering beneath
a bent streetlamp, my leaver already, throttling past
the cratered kiosks, murmurous in the womb of
your reeking overcoat, onward to the bus station plaza.
The year of Englishes was the year of wet charcoal
scoops. Cold cassava lidded with tropic rainwater
boiled to fudge sweet as the sweep of found Milo
packets, prices quartered, notch after singed tear-notch.
What I prize of Englishes is the lick of tang-soured
count. Peals of laughter syllabled over the whir of
lost smokes. Teaching the townspeople improper,
illegible hide and seek from the watch of a flanked escort.
What I recollect of your, my Englishes is
the rote of your crackling baritone
hung in air so dirty, so urgent, so alive
but never in excess—
Sumita Chakraborty on Migwi Mwangi
With a remarkable blend of realism and surrealism, this submission uses thick and captivating diction and syntax to explore necropolitics, the violence and the joy of language, spirituality, and how we sustain and care for ourselves. In keeping with the spirit of this award and the poet whose name it bears, the interplay between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” in these poems causes those categories to mingle, sometimes transcendentally and sometimes traumatically—the everyday okra turned magical under half and full moons, the sacred palm wine ensnared within a colonial grasp.
While each poem is remarkable, and each poem explores distinct formal and linguistic grounds while remaining tied by their shared sociopolitical ethos, my favorite poem personally is “Contrasuture,” which traces those investments into and through plural Englishes:
The year of Englishes was the year of wet charcoal
scoops. Cold cassava flesh lidded with tropic rainwater
boiled to fudge sweet as the sweep of found Milo packets
prices quartered, notch after singed tear-notch.
What I prize of Englishes is the lick of tang-soured
count. Peals of laughter syllabled over the whir of
lost smokes. Teaching the townspeople improper,
illegible hide and seek from the watch of a flanked escort.
That this poem also has the courage to end by unraveling its careful diction and trailing into the air is an even more exceptional feat. As the poet writes in another poem, “Elegy Lotioned into Ars Poetica,” “to speak in this our Englishes into clamor to sleep inside your voice, / to canal into the Babel of my ear.” I deeply admire this poet’s inventive language, risky imagination, and unflinching politics.
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Migwi Mwangi is a storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya. His work has been featured in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He has been nominated for Best New Poets and is an MFA candidate at NYU's Creative Writing Program.
FINALISTS
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). The managing poetry editor at Foglifter, he lives on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires in what is commonly known as Chicago.
Jess Yuan (she/her) is a poet and architect. She is the author of Slow Render (2024), winner of the Airlie Prize, and Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. Jess is a current MFA student at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and has received fellowships from Kundiman and Miami Writers Institute. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.