I'm honored and surprised to learn that Monica Youn chose my poem, "Silk Nor Say," for the Emily Dickinson Award as part of the Poetry Society of America's annual awards. Here is a link to the poem, and Youn's full citation below:
https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/awards/annual/winners/2017/award_10/
“Ants, we are told, can lift 50 times their own body weight—something that doesn’t seem strange when you look at their chitinous exoskeletons, but that feels startling when you turn your attention to their hair-thin, cantilevered legs. Something of the tensile delicacy of an ant’s leg inheres in the poems of Emily Dickinson and in this poem, “Silk Nor Say”—a seemingly insubstantial attachment that is almost invisibly armored; a sudden acute angle that seems arbitrary until you realize how much weight it bears. Insectile weightlessness meets perpendicular gothic in the slant rhymes of the poem—asked / thicket/ knotted/ battled / better / reluctant / attention / butterfly / lightning / silent / secret – counterbalanced by luxuriantly drawn out monosyllables—cool / mind / blue / eye / gray / line. Sonics and sensibility merge here— you begin to experience the recursive folds of thought as a kind of rhyme, compulsive self-doubt as a kind of rhythm.”
