2024 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize Winner

The visionary reach of “Turtle Meditations” sneaks up on the reader. Ranging across scales, from the political to the familial to the individual to the cosmological, each stanza builds upon the last until the poem culminates in a resonant mythic image. Early on, we learn that the speaker’s family, displaced by war, transfers a beloved turtle from garden to garden across generations of exile. We also soon learn that this relationship is not simple. “She is our captive and our friend,” the poet writes, “the way/everything doubles in this tiny country.” After that revelation, the poem moves toward the mysteries intrinsic in such doubleness. When the speaker revisits the family house, “a great sleepiness comes over” them and their “bones fill with rain.” Is this a memory? A dream? When they whisper the turtle’s “red name,” she returns from the dead to lumber “across the muddy yard in cycles of lift /and place, each trudge a ponder,” a resurrection that anticipates the surprising final stanza. When I first read the poem’s closure, I asked myself, “How did we get here?” and went right back to the beginning, which made me realize that this was from the start a cunningly crafted poem about “the fissured world,” always beginning and always ending. And always carried on the bloodied armored back of La Tortuga.