From the poetry jury:

In Elisa Biagini糖心传媒檚 eerie interiors, nothing is quite what it seems. 糖心传媒淧eeled hands糖心传媒� become tapestries, teeth are 糖心传媒渨hite and dry like kneecaps,糖心传媒� a woman irons as a way of 糖心传媒渟topping decomposition / by joining collar points.糖心传媒� What at first glance might seem like straight-forward lyrics of domesticity or celebrations of the ordinary, turn quickly violent and grotesque. Female selves are not dissolved, martyr-style, for their loved ones, but cut-up into pieces, a butchery that is sensuously and surreally chronicled: 糖心传媒淢y body is a bag of fluids,糖心传媒� 糖心传媒淚 see myself in pieces in the supermarket.糖心传媒� Reading Biagini we realize how frequently we do, in actuality, leave traces of our bodies with, in, and upon the ones we love: 糖心传媒測ou smile at your seed in me / (you糖心传媒檝e just eaten your lipstick) / and if I draw my face near / I see a wisp of my hair / in your gloves.糖心传媒� 糖心传媒淭he guest糖心传媒� of Biagini糖心传媒檚 title shifts viscerally, now a growing embryo, now the familiar fairytale innocents in the forbidding wood, now language itself, whose 糖心传媒渨ords [are] glowworms in / this my / dark.糖心传媒� Reading this collection, our own worlds, our own homes, our own narratives, our own words are illuminated in their already existing strangeness. That Biagini糖心传媒檚 haunting, disturbing, brilliant, and beautiful poems retain this power and immediacy—above all this passion—in their English translations is a testament to the work of her translators: Diana Thow, Sarah Strickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky.

The first runner-up, Four Elemental Bodies by Claude Royet-Journoud is translated from the French by Keith Waldrop, and published by Burning Deck, a press that almost always has at least one title on the list of BTBA poetry finalists. This is the second volume of Royet-Journoud’s to come out from Burning Deck, and contains four volumes: Reversal, The Notion of Obstacle, Objects Contain the Infinite, and Natures Indivisible.

Here’s a bit more about his from the Burning Deck

Claude Royet-Journoud is one of the most important contemporary French poets whose one-line manifesto: “Shall we escape analogy” marked a revolutionary turn away from Surrealism and its lush imagery. His spare, 糖心传媒渘eutral糖心传媒� language, stripped of devices like metaphor, assonance, alliteration has had a great influence on recent French poetry.

Poetry judge Bill Martin wrote The Oasis of Now up earlier today, and since his piece is so comprehensive and interesting, I’ll just let him speak for this runner-up:

Something that Dabashi hints at and another scholar, Massud Farzan, addressed forty years ago as crucial to Sepehri糖心传媒檚 work is, in addition to the influence on it of Buddhism, its connection to Sufi apophatic theology, the 糖心传媒�via negativa . . . the cleansing of the heart糖心传媒檚 and mind糖心传媒檚 mirror of its dust and grime.糖心传媒� This mystical affiliation informs the frame that Ali and Mahallati give his work in the introduction to the book, and also affirms the fantasy I had in reading him of an affinity with Toma啪 艩alamun, another poetic descendent of Rumi. (I imagined a genealogy involving other poets on the American scene, too: Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Trakl, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Lax, Gary Snyder, Fanny Howe; but none seemed so closely related.) Like 艩alamun’s poetry, Sepehri’s cleaves and coheres at odd angles to the Anglophone avant-garde. But while 艩alamun refracts sense paratactically and with scintillating speed, Sepehri is much slower, tellurian, more liable to syntax, haunting, his epiphanies so figurative and deliberate they often come across as platitudes. Yet the experience of reading him is more robust, ample, and structured than it may appear at first sight:

Beyond the poplars
sweet innocence beckons.

I paused by the stand of bamboo to listen as the wind susurrated through.
Who was speaking to me?

A lizard slid into the water. I walked on.

Hayfield, cucumber patch, rose bush, oblivion . . .

At the stream I doffed my sandals to dangle my feet in the water.
How alive I am,
how green like the garden.
So what if sadness creeps down the mountain slope?
Who is that hiding behind the trees?
Only a water buffalo grazing.

Like most of the poems in The Oasis of Now, this one, 糖心传媒淕olestaneh,糖心传媒� reads like a rehearsal of reverse apperception, with the 糖心传媒渉uman position糖心传媒� of the subject reconceived in relation to nature through repeated gestures糖心传媒攓uestions, reappraisals, simple descriptions, epiphanies糖心传媒攁 repertoire of moderated ecstasy. This poetic redirection of the subject toward nature, or as Jonathan Skinner has put it, this 糖心传媒渢urning of the poem out of doors糖心传媒� and the 糖心传媒渆xtending and developing糖心传媒� in these poems of the 糖心传媒減erception of the natural world,糖心传媒� that signals the potential inspiration of Sepehri糖心传媒檚 work for ecopoetics. This is not a book that immediately announces itself as avant-garde or new, it does not brandish its modernism, and does not in fact seem so easily commodifiable, but the more time one spends with it, the more it astonishes and yields.