2023 Award Winner
The PearTree: elegy for a farm
by Bethany Reid

Judge’s note: The Pear Tree, an elegy for a farm is an elegant, sensory, satisfying collection of poems. Even in this nostalgic location, “chickens have to be fed, necks wrung” and still it is a place of “such good work.” Beauty and grief abound in nearly equal measure between remembered notes of “creeksong, birdsong, rain on leaves,” for “if a field of sorrow, another of joy.”

Praise for The Pear Tree

Bethany Reid’s The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm  is more than a haunting elegy for a farm; it’s a powerful evocation of childhood and a vanished way of life. In poems lush with detail, Reid renders the beauty and suffering of bygone days, not with nostalgia but with clear-eyed honesty, as each poem reveals its hidden facets. Under the watchful eye of a pear tree planted by a grandmother on homesteaded land, we witness the pleasure of day-to-day life rooted in the earth, the heart-wrenching loss of a brother, a father “who taught us to choose what matters and put a fence around it,” a devout mother who can still play the piano when words have flown. “Who will gather what we leave behind?” one poem asks. Moving freely back and forth in time, this well-steeped, finely-honed collection offers a complex, satisfying answer. 

Runner Up

Judge’s note: Redemption emerges from an early deep connection with nature that is re-embraced after a life fraught with sexual abuse, exposure to toxins of many kinds during military service, and brutal work environments.

Finalists

Honorable Mention

MoonPath Press is an imprint of Concrete Wolf