2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest Winner
Smolder
Colleen Morton Busch
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
Reviews
I don’t know about you, reader, but the reason I turn to poetry, still, after all these years, is for the reassurance of our humanness that can be found in the best of our poets. In Colleen Morton Busch’s collection, Smolder, you’ll find an abundance of such. Written with a serious and intelligent candor, about those things we struggle with most deeply in our lives – loss, aging, death –while exploring the burdens of consciousness with dignity and unrelenting grace. The poet’s scrupulous and imaginative attention to detail, brought together with a highly informed musical regard for our language, insures that these poems are not simply testimonies, but real testaments to the best of who and what we can be. I am grateful for having read these poems.
Bruce Weigl
Author of Apostle of Desire
“Cherish everything” may seem like simple advice, yet the tender, clear-sighted poems in Smolder demonstrate how true and necessary that advice is. On every astonishing page, Busch interrogates what it means to be consumed—by illness, by grief, by uncertainty—as well as what it means to be sustained by the beauty of the natural world and by our relationships. The answers offered are hard-won, beautifully rendered, and above all—necessary.
Carrie Shipers
Author of Grief Land
In this collection, Busch calls for us to inquire into presence, to turn towards the space “between before and after,” even when this here & now is hard: full of medical worry, hospice, & the prospect of not getting to be a mother—those symbolic moments so many of us inevitably meet. Yet, when faced with discomfort, Busch’s speaker & other voices don’t turn away; they choose to appreciate each opportunity to feel their aliveness. Upon reading this collection, we get to do the same, & “say, I’m just so grateful.”
Emily Hyland
Author of My Wise Little Ghost
Colleen Morton Busch’s SMOLDER is a book of illnesses, desires, painful might have beens, struggles to conceive, excruciating waiting, and also of the luck that makes us feel and binds us one to another, and of the miracle of living, full stop. Revel in its “hacksawed stubborn hungers” and “last bright stomp through the cold.” Read these poems and you too may feel aware of the fragile improbable miracle—your bounded time; your own muddled love and desire; that something in these “defies extinction.” SMOLDER burns with a great deal of incandescent light.
Tess Taylor
Author of Rift Zone
About the Author
Colleen Morton Busch
Colleen Morton Busch is the author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, named a 2011 book of the year by Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. Her debut poetry collection, Smolder, won Ex Ophidia Press’s 2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest. Her prose and poetry have appeard in Orion, Tricycle, Yoga Journal, the Washington Post, HuffPost, Poet Lore, MĀNOA, New Orleans Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. A lay-ordained Zen practitioner, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Find her at colleenmortonbusch.com.
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