2023 Student Poetry Award

This is a poem in which it all comes together—craft, conceit, and the larger concern. The poem situates the “dad” as a figure of history and culture, weighing on the speaker, encouraging her to write a race poem, but she protests: “I’m sixteen & understand / that ethnic drift is the rage. That / ethnic rage is the rage.” The poem sets up a pattern in which this morph of language hinges on the line breaks, and the staggered lines mimic the vacillation of the speaker between the hyphenated American’s two unappealing extremes: losing culture or virtue-signaling; losing language or embracing cliché. The poem seeks to find a precious third position, the kind of nuance at which only the poet can arrive.

Traditional Chinese characters slip into the poem via the Dad’s dialogue, “Because it’s profitable to liken / English lettering to / a bloated lifeboat.” Really, the poet just wants to write a nature poem, after all, “every Chinese girl’s / got a sonnet crown / about dumplings.” Here, the poet’s attention is drawn to the crown of the kingbird, “the whetted arc of its feathers . . . Nothing more.” Or so she writes.

We know better because we’ve been following the poet’s intentional choices, her every word—none of which are superfluous or arbitrarily placed in the scene. Everything here is “minutia I can / contrive to a symbol”: the poet writes, “The Mirror Lake’s a frisbee, / or an Oriental court fan.” In each turn of the line, there is always something more. In this way the poem holds everything.

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Chloe Wong is a junior at Arcadia High School in Arcadia, California. Her work has been nationally recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, The New York Times, Hollins University, and more. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, and will be part of the Adroit Journal's 2023 Summer Mentorship cohort. In her free time, she loves spending time with Rusty and Lily, her pet cats.

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Finalists

Sebastian Buck is a 16-year-old Junior who attends Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York. He is also an accomplished conceptual artist, violist, and competitive tennis player.

Iris Cai is a sophomore at The Harker School in San Jose, California. Her poetry has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and is published in or forthcoming from On the Seawall, Neologism Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. When she's not writing, Iris enjoys reading, playing piano, and perfecting her milk tea recipe.

Kaydance Rice is a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan and is currently attending Interlochen Arts Academy. She is the recipient of several regional and national awards from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Taco Bell Quarterly, YoungArts Anthology, Cargoes, Voicemail Poems, and Full Mood Mag. In her free time, Kaydance enjoys playing the viola, rambling about existentialism, and spending time with her plants.

Xime Silva is a junior at Interlochen Arts Academy, studying creative writing.