Vanitas: Half Skull, Orchid, Gecko
“Vanitas: Half Skull, Orchid, Gecko” by Harrison Hamm is the winner of the 2025 Love and Eros Prize, selected by Sun Yung Shin. We’re honored to share this exquisite poem with you.
“‘I enjoyed the sensuous juxtapositions in ‘Vanitas: Half Skull, Orchid, Gecko’ in light of the theme of this year’s prize. This prose poem’s rectangle makes a frame for a tableau that bristles with an aftermath, with the overripe; the intimacy and beauty of life and death feels Gothic but not maudlin. This poet makes wonderful use of sound to encourage the reader to linger over the implied textures of the embodied elements here, ‘rotten apricot,’ ‘sentinel snail,’ ‘smoked throat.’ The flies as ‘little black seances’ and other evocative metaphors in the poem bring us into a decadent miniature world of spiritualism and seduction. I appreciated how the poem shifts toward the end, with commands to the reader to imagine an energetic conclusion to the nocturnal scene.”
–Sun Yung Shin, Guest Judge
