2025 Hurt & Healing Prize SECOND PLACE WINNER: “LETTER TO YOU AS THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF GERDA TARO” By Maxwell Putnam

A huge congratulations to Maxwell Putnam whose poem “LETTER TO YOU AS THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF GERDA TARO” was selected by Robert Wood Lynn as the SECOND PLACE winner of the 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize competition.
Maxwell Putnam’s photographic detail and precision with language captures the dull ache of loss. His work with word choice falls just shy of fanciful with its beautiful specificity. Putnam is a speaker whose feet remain painstakingly pressed into the sand. The skill of Putnam’s writing is his ability to convey how the clouds in his memories create intimate mirages where the real world bends to his melancholy strangeness. A place where nothing makes sense anymore. Where the sun has a mouth to open, grapefruits feast, and the face of their loved one is nowhere to be found by the shore.
Enjoy their poem below.
LETTER TO YOU AS THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF GERDA TARO

Maxwell Putnam
Maxwell Putnam (he/him) is a poet and essayist living in the Catskills.