Marjolein Rotsteeg — Touchstone Award for Individual Poems — Winner 2025

Marjolein Rotsteeg is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Poems for 2025, for the poem:

summer solstice
every day a little more
daughter than son

— Marjolein Rotsteeg, The Mainichi, August 21, 2025.

Commentary from the Panel:

Transitions are the essence of life. We are all shifting from one age to another, passing through various seasons and storms, or ever-evolving into who we strive to become. This poem shines a delicate light on a challenging and sociopolitically charged transition, that of transitioning genders.

While one only needs to turn on the news to hear opinions on trans people, their bodies, or their lives, or read of the violence enacted towards the trans community, this poem seems to offer only a window into the experience without telling the reader what or how to feel. It uniquely renders the gradual understanding of identity, the small increments of knowing who we are, and who we are becoming.

The solstice itself is a progression as well as a gradual unfolding of what will be revealed in the second half of the year. Here, with “every day a little more” we are brought into the small moments within the largeness of the act of transition. It takes time, learning and unlearning, and moments of discovery and acceptance to become someone new. For the person in transition, as well as everyone else in their life, it is a gradual process, which the poet has deftly conveyed visually with line two, or the middle of the poem, to express progression.

We are not told whether this is from the daughter’s, the parent’s, or another loved one’s viewpoint. Only that they are becoming a daughter. Line three offers us the potentially double-sided coin of grief and joy. As the earth is letting go of the sun (in the northern hemisphere), so, too, is the individual letting go of the identity of being a son. With any transition, there is as much hello as there is goodbye. We are left with space to enter this moment with respect and see both sides.

After the solstice, the nights creep ever longer, hinting at the dangers the person in transition faces. The world is not safe for trans individuals. However, the poet has rendered a tenderness with their phrasing that suggests safety and celebration within family or chosen family. During pivotal moments in history, art must lead the way, and the timeliness of this poem cannot be overlooked.

Touchstone winners receive a crystal award to commemorate their selection. See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.

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