Maggie Weaver

This poem is the winner of the University of Virginia’s 2020 Hannah Kahn Poetry Prize for best poem by a fourth-year English Major. According to the committee,  “ ‘Stopping by Walnut Creek Park,’ with its shout-out to Robert Frost’s iconic ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ is an ambitious, metaphysical meditation on the identity of the individual self in relation to the natural world.  The imagination at work as this speaker explores his/her/their eco-/ego-poetics, is startlingly fresh.  Phrases like “Soon, a plane rips through the air, like a zipper / and I start a relationship with the sky”  and “Night / is coming, and I want to tamp it down / until it gives me my correct name”   evince a marvelous, smart sensibility full of talent, wonder, and originality.”