Brockman-Campbell Book Award Honorable Mention

Julie Funderburk’s debut poetry collection, The Door That Always Opens, braids together poems of sharp lyrical imagery and experimental narrative focused frequently on houses: houses under construction or demolition, inhabited, abandoned, and vandalized. Sparkling with details of landscapes and seascapes, her poems depict a state of isometric tension as people struggle to communicate and connect, pulled by feeling and pushed by logic, trapped between choices and mixed loyalties.

Despite what is unknown or misunderstood, however, the poems in The Door That Always Opens retain hope, as life persists in the beauty of the visible world.