from River Heron Poetry Prize final judge, John Sibley Williams:
“Encompassing heartbreaking personal narrative, self-exploration, classical music, natural imagery, and musings on the composition process itself, “Proper Fugue” is hard-to-pin-down. It’s bold, epic, tense, melodic, and, above all, filled with truth. The line breaks lead us off cliffs. Phrases like “It is the absence / of wings that teaches us to walk.” and “I have learned so little / is a distance” demand our full attention, filling us with inherently unanswerable questions that feel, despite their abstract nature, intimately human…and perhaps even answerable.”

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama with four
incredible mammals. Find her poems and prose in recent issues of *Juked,
DIAGRAM, New South, Mantis, VOLT, Cloudbank, New Orleans Review Online*,
and others. Her debut fiction collection,* Every Mask I Tried On*, won the
Brighthorse Books Prize and will be available in May 2018. She serves as
Poetry Editor for *Pidgeonholes* and President of the Alabama State Poetry
Society.

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