O

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“Since becoming a parent, more and more of my time has been spent with children’s books. Their reliance on sonic play—rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance—make many of them a delight to read. They were a way of re-entering the lushness of language in those early months when I was away from my own writing. When I did get back to the page, I kept thinking about alphabet books, especially those featuring animals. They say to children: look, the world is a vast kaleidoscope; look, its creatures are miraculous. But what if we were honest? If we said that koalas will vanish, and zebras, and orangutans, and that we—the authors of these books—are ensuring their vanishing? O is the sound of both praise and dismay. It’s the sound my mouth is always making.”
—Claire Wahmanholm

Judges’ Citation by Julia Alvarez and Bill McKibben

About the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize 

Claire Wahmanholm’s “O” is the second place winner of the inaugural Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. Established in 2019 with generous support from Treehouse Investments, the prize is given to honor exceptional poems that help make real for readers the gravity of the vulnerable state of our environment at present. Beginning with the Saturday after Earth Day, Poem-a-Day will feature this year’s three winners.