In Smolder, the lens of being witness to what the beloved must endure shows a world simultaneously abundant with tenderness, lucency, emptiness, hopeful math, acheful grief, bald ibis, flammable trees, orcas, desire to be “body to body,” doctor visits, what one would give up, and the intertwining existence of the more-than-human world as a respite to the chatter of the mind, of the “restless whole.”
—Felicia Zamora, 2025 judge and author of Interstitial Archaeology