2025 Micro Chapbook Prize-The Fragrant Blue Garden of Saints

Stephanie Chang's The Fragrant Blue Garden of Saints is a lively, atmospheric collection of longing and wanting, bounding with nature from the microcosmic to the universally grandeur. Chosen as the winning summer chapbook from Palette Poetry's 2025 Micro Chapbook Prize, the poems in The Fragrant Blue Garden of Saints energetically vault through warm bodies of water and field to examine identity, systems of love and loss, and the natural world in all its want, highlighting human desire as the connection to the earth. Desperation and gentle ease simultaneously expand through an exploration of want, instinct, and the intense presence of constant, teeming life. Within Chang's focused diction, we see the decay and finitude present within all living things, the world green and overflowing with life and vitality to the point of a desired claustrophobia, and everything dewy with the glossy substance of life's pinnacle.