The 2022 Orison Poetry Prize’s winner was Hussain Ahmed for his manuscript, ” Blue Exodus”, which was selected as the winning manuscript by the Indo-Caribbean American poet Rajiv Mohabir. R

This is what the judge had to say about the manuscript:

“Prayer, refuge, inheritance, and loss, beat in the heart of these poems. Things are not what they seem to be: even in paradise ‘a baobab died / with roots inside the ground.’ Indeed, these lines ask the reader to interrogate all things in new vocabularies of anguish, born from the inheritor of a war—still being fought in the muscle memory of the people who lived through it. Tension coils in every stanza, relieved by the fulfilment of grammar, yet troubling in the refusal of simple answers. Reading this collection again and again, I come away with the specters of the living and passed, asking me what it means to live as a story lives, to write a life’s ghost into poem. Entreaties to the Divine remain unanswered and unfulfilled as people are sent off to wars or drown in seas trying to escape as the poet reminds us, ‘What twirls / over your roof / is either a kite / or a missile.’ In these war-haunted skies no simple answers plume into songbirds. Rather the speaker stares into the eyes of history, transforming the unavoidable into a bridge of woven images and into story. The speaker-as-witness-as-refugee claims a place to stand in their mourning and grief, where ‘echoes are translated into qasida.’ Like the speaker calls out to the blackbird, I find myself calling out to the poet, ‘saa magni dear bird, / tell me a story.'”

The runner-up and finalists were: Cory Hutchinson-Reuss, “The Way a Koan Is an Oak”; Jeddie Sophronius, “Happy Poems & Other Lies”; Marco Yan, “Whoever Told Me Not to Dive Headfirst Dove Headfirst & Knew the Taste”; and Ryler Dustin, “Another Sky” respectively.

Ahmed will receive $1,500 and publication of his collection by Orison Books.