2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize

Guest Judge Michael McGriff on the winning poem “Stranger Fruits Grew Here”:

"One of the tenets of surrealism, from Mary Ruefle and Noah Falck to André Breton and Tomas Tranströmer, is that the line between the figurative and the empirical is abolished. Actually, it never existed in the first place! For the surrealist, everything unfolds in a refusal to operate within the agreeable systems of the world. This is why Yannis Ritsos, Peter Everwine, and Malena Mörling keep me up, late into the night, reading lines that suddenly become the dreams I once had, dreams that took a poem to guide me back a place of mystery and meaning. "Stranger Fruits Grew Here" is a surefooted and ultimately arresting poem that carries on this work. Wasima Khan knows quite well that family and the homeplace exist beyond comprehension--and certainly beyond journalistic representation. I'm haunted by this poem's confluence of image-making and understatement, by the simmering, disembodied crisis that hums just beneath its surface. This poem can speak for itself, as it should, as it does."