Finalist 2025 River Heron Poetry Prize
“Arrival” came out of those hazy, oxytocin-drenched months right after my child was born when I tried to shut out the world and just be present. I turned off the news, but of course it still seeped in. The poem sits in that tension--trying to protect something small and new while the world keeps burning and blooming all around us. For me, it’s also about hope: the quiet, daily work of learning to care for each other, learning to feed and be fed.
Julia Foshee holds a Master’s in Literature from UT Austin and is a graduate of Columbia’s Narrative Medicine program. She is the founder of NarrativeRx, a medical humanities initiative fostering reflection and connection among healthcare providers, patients, and advocates. Her poetry and essays on motherhood, spirituality, and ecology appear or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Literary Mama, North of Oxford, River Heron, Sixfold (prizewinner), Brilliant Flash Fiction, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted as a Best Emerging Writer of 2024 by The Masters Review and is a current finalist for the Jack McCarthy “Write Bloody” Book Prize.
Judge Jed Myers’ Comments:
What arrives in this irresistible poem is not only the child who brings love’s focus to a new mother’s life, but the cicadas the birds feed on, the butterflies come of the caterpillars spared by the glut of cicadas, the news that’s known well enough even if it’s turned off (“…teachers in Ukraine learning / how to load automatics…”), the “big bowl of oxytocin soup” that makes “the world only as big as the one you could see / from your face to mine…, and “the earth…about to feast on the bodies of the loud” (cicadas)…. This is a poem of maternal love and its instinctual strength powerful enough to tune the ever-threatening world out. The piece is written with an improvisational joy that reckons with, rather than ignores, the dreads such love transcends.