Donald Justice Poetry Prize

John Foy's newest collection is a tour de force of formal poetry, offering a blend of wit, cleverness, and deftness. Working in the lineage of poets like Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Frank O'Hara, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop, Foy probes everyday experiences to generate compassionate, clever, and deeply knowing verse. Foy satirizes various elements of contemporary society, reflecting on war, wandering through the Museum of Sex in New York with his wife, and plucking apart idiomatic speech, which he breaks down, saying "It is what it is. / It's not what it might have been." Influenced by pop art and fine art and his New York home, which forms the backdrop of many of these poems, Foy's vibrant collection is simultaneously philosophical, whimsical, serious, and searching.

Voice Message explores through villanelles, sonnets, quatrains, and even free verse the consolation and devastation that art and poetry offer. In her debut collection, Swett engages the art of Vermeer to guide and contextualize the pain of losing a child, exploring how can art offer motivation, comfort, and release. In these poems, there is tenderness for our vulnerable earth as well as for our fragile human bodies. Swett's collection is a poignant and measured collection that reminds us of art's ability to heal.