We’re so pleased to announce that we have chosen a winner for the 2025 Hudson Prize. A big, heartfelt congratulations goes to Greg Nicholl for winning the prize with his poetry collection Ghost in the Graveyard. Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semi-finalists. Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2025h Hudson Prize!
Greg Nicholl is a freelance editor whose poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2023, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, River Styx, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2021 River Styx International Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the 2022 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod and the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Greg has lived in Washington State, Germany, New Jersey, New York, Idaho, Baltimore, Boston, and most recently Columbus, Ohio.
Photo Credit: Christina Kenney
Selected Poems from Ghost in the Graveyard
Ghost Town
To become a ghost town requires decay
and ghosts. A wall collapses,
then another. Out west, the landscape
is rampant with ghosts, towns abandoned,
windows thin as parchment that shatter
once frames sag, old mills that produce
little more than tumbleweed and rodents.
This town found a way to avoid decay,
a way to avoid the prick of the rusted nail,
shards of glass, the figure that stares
from an upstairs window every night
since her death. This town
refused that fate, the empty houses
placed onto trucks then carried away.
The old town declared defunct.
Declared restored. Salvaged. Safe.
Repopulation
At what temperature does soil ignite, become sterile?
How long before nutrients regenerate?
Before bright green shoots poke through the blackened terrain?
That town in Missouri was evacuated days before Christmas—
the floodplain so dried up they sprayed the streets
with a slurry of silt and dioxin—the whole town toxic,
its houses condemned, then buried.
Scientists discovered they could purify the soil,
send it into remission if the fire burned hot enough. Dust
reborn as a park, trails leading through hickory and sweetgum,
clearings where kids run barefoot through the grass.
No sign of the town long since buried underneath,
nor the hand that cupped the spark nested in thistledown,
breath gently blowing into the palm as if to coax: wake up, wake up.
Formations
Caught on the wrong side of the dam’s blueprint,
a tribe is displaced, the land redlined. Architects
divert streams, call it advancement—easy for them
to pretend original boundaries never existed
if they really want to. Settlements submerged
house by house, their foundations mistaken
for creatures who continuously lurk beneath
murky lagoons. On clear days, you can see
the entrance of the town hall, walls of a saloon,
a school yard with an abandoned orchard out back.
On the other side of the dam, in another town,
boys float toy soldiers in Styrofoam cups,
leave them overnight to freeze, their plastic bodies
suspended in cylinders of ice, a lineup they dub
Chernobyl. The ice so clear it reveals tiny green men
who stand ready to attack invisible armies
that approach from all sides. Anything to protect
their land from hostile takeover.
And when the temperature rises and the boys dive
into the lake, they forget the town beneath,
their feet barely grazing the top of the church spire
as they dip below the surface to swim toward the other side.