Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Winner: John Bonanni
retrovirology

John Bonanni is a Cape Cod–based writer who serves as founding editor of the Cape Cod Review. His poems have appeared in Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, Southern Indiana Review, Washington Square Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Gulf Coast, and his literary criticism has been featured in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, and The Kenyon Review. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and residencies from AS220 and the John Hay Writing Studio. His research on poetry as an intervention for writing attitudes among learners with severe disabilities can be found in The Graduate Review (Bridgewater State University), and his chapbook, a rotary phone that dings when you move it (Cape Cod Editions), was funded by a matching grant from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod and the National Endowment for the Arts, before the NEA was gutted by neofascism. 

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, judge: “retrovirology captures the urgency that few books contain: This book is a remembrance of those who passed away during the AIDS epidemic, but equally, it is an altar built to honor those Ancestors of that mournful time. And I say, now in this new year, in this new place—where some are trying to take us back to an old place—now is the time for urgency. Now is the time for those Ancestors’ wisdom. Now is the time to call their names: Larry Kramer and Gaëtan Dugas. Now is the time to speak back against erasure. To reclaim this history. This crucial fierceness. Now: This remembrance that is painful but also beautiful. Now: A taking up space on the page and within the spirit. And I’m so grateful to have read this book—I’m so grateful that it chose me in this time.”