Notes on "“Funerary Pin” by A. Jenson
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By 2025 Poetry Contest Judge Blas Falconer
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“Funerary Pin” is a quiet, resonant meditation on how we carry loss—not just in memory, but in objects, places, and gestures. I was struck by how absence hums beneath the imagery: a cedar rose, mussel shells, a crab falling from the sky. The poem moves with a steady, deliberate rhythm, and the end-stopped lines give each thought room to settle. The language throughout is quietly musical, pulling the reader through with its repetition and movement between image and reflection. I loved the shift from concrete detail to something more philosophical—the idea that we die “by dilutions, by eons” rather than all at once—redefining death as something slow and cumulative. The closing images—the funerary pin, the hunger, the thumbprint—are particularly powerful, impressions of what grief leaves behind.
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Blas Falconer is the author of Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024); Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018); The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012); A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007); and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006). He is a coeditor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Falconer’s awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship. Born and raised in Virginia, Falconer earned an MFA from the University of Maryland (1997) and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston (2002). He lives in Los Angeles with his family.
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