In poetry, our winner is Mariya Zilberman for her poem “Against Temporality.” Of her poem, poetry judge Ilya Kaminsky says, “This poem dares to be simple: and, as a result, the nuances are uncovered in the tension between image and time, detail and emotion, silences and linebreaks. We are presented with a number of details, but it is what isn’t presented that moves us, absorbs. ‘A woman asleep on the bus / holds a succulent,’ [Zilberman] writes. But it is the observer that in the end compels us.
