2026 Hurt & Healing Prize THIRD PLACE WINNER: “The Geography of the Unfinished Room” by Maryam Daftari
Frontier Poetry is excited to congratulate the THIRD PLACE winner of the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize— Maryam Daftari with her poem “The Geography of the Unfinished Room”
Maryam Daftari’s poem is exceptional for the way it fuses the language of science, architecture, and faith into an intimate testimony of survival beneath modern warfare. Through striking juxtapositions—a classroom lesson beside collapsing ceilings, a prayer rug beneath falling beams, the endurance of light against the machinery of destruction—the poem creates tension between human fragility and the immense, impersonal force of violence. Its imagery is both lyrical and devastating, grounding catastrophe in the textures of ordinary life: pomegranates, graphite, rain on brick. What lingers long after the final line is the speaker’s unfinished sentence itself—a refusal to let memory, learning, or humanity be erased.
Enjoy the poem below.
The Geography of the Unfinished Room
Maryam Daftari
Maryam Daftari started writing poetry as an undergraduate, winning several awards. Maryam’s poems have been chosen for publication in many of the annual editions of Lyrical Iowa and San Diego Poetry Annual (2013-2025), A Year in Ink (2023-2024), in Stand Forth and A Step Between, publications of Iowa’s Society of Great River Poets. Her poems have also appeared in an anthology of San Diego poets entitled Sundays at Liberty Station. She has won 1st place in Traditional Poetry Style in a competition by the Iowa Poetry Association in 2024 for “As It Rises One Degree.” Maryam is the author of five poetry collections, Like Magic but Real, Haiku Workbook and Kintsugi: Poems of Hope and Healing, Embrace the Dawn and Poetic Weavings at Moonlight Beach.
