Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook. TOWNSHEND â On a trip to Iceland in 2009, poet Lucas Farrellâs wife, artist Louisa Conrad, brought him a fish hook that had pierced the bottom of her boot. The hook sat on his desk for a while as he wrote. âAnd then everything I was writing kept steering back to that hook,â Farrell, 39, recalled recently. His meditations on the fish hook would become the fourth and final section of âthe blue-collar sun,â the manuscript that won the Townshend farmer the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award for a first or second manuscript by a Vermont poet. This was the first year of the contest, designed to highlight emerging writers.