these are the waterfalls in my head (2026)

From the Introduction by Diannely Antigua, the 2026 Granite State Poetry Prize judge:

"When I first read JeFF Stumpo's these are the waterfalls in my head, I was struck by how insistently the book returns us to a single word: tonight. Each poem begins there, in the immediate, unsettled present, a space that feels intimate and inescapable. This repetition isn't decorative, rather deliberate. It is the book's ethical stance. These poems insist that what happens in the mind, the body, memory, and dream is happening now.

Again and again, the poems open with an address that refuses distance: "[Tonight you are washing your hands in the bathroom sink...]," "[Tonight you are hungry and faithless in a cathedral...]," "[Tonight you are not the sailor but the shipwreck...]" From the first pages, the reader is implicated. The second person does not offer escape. You are not observing

these scenes; you are inside them. .."