Award Winners
2024 Student Poetry Award
Aaliyah Anderson
![Aaliyah Anderson author photo](https://poetrysociety.org/assets/people/Aaliyah-Anderson-author-photo.png)
Temperance
Why does it enrage an animal to be given what it already knows?
—Anne Carson
In stance, spotted figments like to conduct
games, too. Although, my hands do not know
what to do with a quantity more than ten. I walk out
and pursue sounding out openings, warm at the taste
of afternoon flesh, a simple so tough and molded,
meandering was never fun. A man claimed God died
in his mouth before wishing me happy holidays. I
wondered how he talked around his holiness, wrapped
myself in logistics on how he makes time for measuring.
A flopped fly sputters in circles with small radii, not
picky for drain, a darting tongue. The noise is too much;
it is hard to finish minutes before they are done. I watch
the machine do its job: fresh-bought vitamin churning
before the now; an orange is orange and round. A stable demeanor.
Selected by Elisa Gonzalez
Elisa Gonzalez on Aaliyah Anderson
This poem enacts the tension between the eternal and the earthly in lines that, though compact, also hare and dart from thought to thought. As it unfolds, it plays with ambiguity, advancing only to revert, inverting expected patterns of thought and introducing into the poet’s quick, curious, reflective mind surprising voices—of a man who “claimed God died in his mouth”—and images—of a fly sputtering “in circles / with small radii”—so that a personal musing attains significance in the world, and with other people. A deeply human poem that understands humans are animals in time, and that can be terrible, but is not always.
All Winners
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001