Award Winners
Robert H. Winner Memorial Award - 2025
M. Cynthia Cheung
Finalists
Kai Carlson-Wee
Meg Day
lüshī
lüshī
from city gates the river once looked as if
it were vapor flowing across the desert
a fire burns in a blue temple
we knew nothing of drones and their errands
they advanced without effort floated over
ripe apricots blushing on our tables
now we are each of us a column of flame
endless talk of what to do about us
lüshī
our lemon groves curdle in ash
at curfew house to house patrols
broadcasts play over the neighborhoods
yesterday they finally caught Dara in his cousin’s attic
boy who delighted in Ovid youth
protests & poetry no earth is ours no body
we kneel behind our doors
the night suspends like a bell
Claire Wahmanholm on M. Cynthia Cheung
M. Cynthia Cheung’s sequence of lüshi captures the backrooms where “empire schedules genocide”; it captures the dull dailiness of “drones and their errands”; it swerves from “grasslands parted by hares” to “naked torsos bloom[ing] into craters.” Here, war’s violence is made all the more appalling by its compression into the lüshi’s eight lines. Cheung is tender in her rendering of domestic details, even as “a bathrobe becomes a shroud” and “our ears [are] blown out upon a wall.” These poems are simultaneously brutal and humane, horrifying and compassionate. They are, in other words, completely of our time, and completely unforgettable.
**
M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, swamp pink, and elsewhere. She practices internal medicine in Houston, Texas.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions). He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a MacDowell Fellowship, and his work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and the Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.
Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest) and We Can't Read This (winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). In 2019, Day published an Unsung Masters volume, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019), with coeditor Niki Herd. Day’s works in ASL—video, projection, and installation—have appeared at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.