Introduction to  Contest Winner
Julia Hastain’s poem


is a landscape of the silence,
a place as far away as possible
from the last contest winner.
What a fractured world she has.
It is a curious location
of vast spaces between
sections of words spread out
distant and separated
forests of words.
Surreal,
disjointed & interconnected
and not connected
all at once
(“the cultivation of imagination’s genitalia”),
footprints of verbs and nouns
both playful (“between here and hear”) and
serious (“like frida kahlo’s last minute jolt”).
It is as if
Kandinsky or Klee
had written these images, or
Calder hung the words
on invisible strings.
I had seen John Cage’s music performance
of silence with musician’s chairs,
and now I saw these silences
in poetry.
I kept expecting
Salvador Dali’s melting clocks
at any moment; but this
is a language poem
in which language becomes
something else
yet again.
Martin Willitts,Jr
Julia's work is a map of her spirit or soul
as it expresses itself in words.  With the
spaces, inlets and mountains and blue
grottos and all the innexpressible lovliness
of existance will be added as Julia
continues.  

One should not labor at "understanding"
this work.  One should simply let it in as if
it becomes a part of you,  just as every
sunrise, every loved face, becomes a part of
each one of us.
--Carolina