From a pool of nearly 800 entries, judges Astrid Lorange, Ender Başkan and outgoing Overland poetry editor Toby Fitch have selected one outstanding winner and two runners-up. In addition to the many topics, issues and perspectives that poets submitting to the prize often examine —  work, class, history, economics, the media, gender, queerness, feminism, the body, the personal et al. —  the field of submissions this year saw an influx of poems grappling with the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people and the global politics surrounding this. Two of these poems made the shortlist. The winning poems below separated themselves from all other entries by virtue of their contemporaneity, completeness, skills with language and form, their deepening with each reading, and their ability to surprise:

The winning poem, “The Dog House”, is a brilliantly told yarn about the speaker’s upbringing frequenting the local pub, “The Dog House, The Dog, The Doggie”, “in the shadow of Kunanyi” (Mount Wellington, nipaluna). This prose poem’s anaphoric, cyclical orality collapses time and place in ways that allude to the ancestral interconnectedness of Aboriginal peoples and the land, while its use of historical parallels (specifically the disjunction between William Lanne and William Crowther) is inspired. There is a unique texture and appeal to the details recounted in memory —  of the sticky carpet smell, of “Dad’s leather jacket, that leather jacket like leather seats in the car”, of running around pub tables with other kids “under the height of the adults’ hips”. One of the more difficult poems to write is a positive, uplifting, dare we say happy poem, but “The Dog House”, even as it evokes the undertow of racial violence and segregation (“If there was a brawl, we were told it was about the footy and often it was”), insists on beauty and playfulness, kinship and country, and the hope of resistance (“WE DON’T HAVE TO LOOK INTO THE FACE OF EVIL TO KNOW IT IS THERE”) to tell a personal and collective story.

“referencing suburbs” is a compact, punchy poem that runs in a narrow left-justified channel on the page, putting in motion an acerbic, trenchant critique of uptight, genteel poetry as represented in the figure of “a thin writer in a dark age” too pleased with their own work, consuming “too much gin at the open mic”. The poem’s second-person gambit works to emphasise the follies of self —  “no despair but the personal” —  and its vanities: “all sex and manners, no hacked phlegm, no family tax benefit a or b”. We are cast into a potent reckoning with class, gender and the body, with how poetry, or at least the kind of poetry this cruel age demands, must be charged with historical and political critiques that go-for-broke. When the “thin writer” anonymises the lesbian bar, we see in the gesture a complicity with the “old economics”. This poem demands that we write our poems as we should live, with clarity, with bravery.

“Trans Pastoral”, a short, disarming lyric, turns on the pastoral as a form ripe for critical reconfiguration. In the poet’s hands, nature is an ambivalent, even impossible subject: nature is not natural, as Gertude Stein once said. The poem is animated by a dialectics of identification and disidentification with the “nation” of naturalised gender — the nationalism of gender as a natural fact (“what is it to be // born / in that bright nation?”) —and by its end, it disavows the world-system that would appeal to nature as a means for refusing ways of being. It is a complex, compelling, and spare construction that in so few words — “like flags held to / change” — poses a question to which trans liberation is the answer: how can we have gender without gendered forms of domination? The poem’s revelation is not affirmation as much as an attunement to contradiction and the sparks of possibility borne of its interminable friction.