Congratulations Charles Byrne, Recipient of the 2022 Ann Fields Award

Congratulations are in order for MFA student Charles Byrne, winner of this year's Ann Fields Poetry Contest! 

"Ghosted" beautifully traces the transformation of absence to memory and of loss into "utterance" and "name," even when "bereft the reception of a human ear." Remembrance shimmies between human and nature, tenderly recalling "her pendulant ghostflower face" and "her hand's curled blue fern of a vein" under a canopy of trees that are also, somehow, home. This is a haunting poem in both subject and effect, finding form within the unsaid, and demanding that "something" be more than "not nothing."