I am excited to congratulate Kristi Maxwell on winning the third annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Later this year Green Linden Press will publish Goners. The poems are lipograms, an ancient form that demands certain letters be excluded when writing the poem; in Maxwell’s case, the letters comprising the names of endangered animals. As she describes, “The piece ‘Cheetah,’ for instance, uses 21 of 26 letters, all but a, c, e, h, and t, so no articles, no cats, no being, no are or were or was, no choice, etc. (no etc.).” In the context of the corrosive effects of imperialism and industrialization, Goners questions the common practice of elegizing and employs an alternative mode. The animals in the titles are absent from the poems—they’re gone. Instead, in a haunting gesture, the poems “foreground the role human-centering has played and continues to play in the sixth extinction underway.”
