2024 Frontier OPEN Finalists Part Two: Nicole Santalucia, Kate DeLay, Robin Wang
Part two of our installment of poems chosen as finalists brings poems from Nicole Santalucia, Kate DeLay, and Robin Wang. Another diverse group, Santalucia’s explorations with form take us immediately into the female body, shifting into and out of fantasy with a deft and focused voice that draws the reader in, and engaged our readers instantly with the confident way she moved between the present moment and the imagined world her speaker seemed to inhabit. Lines like “I watch hour they watch me between legs and hospitals,” created a tensions and unease that Santalucia. continues to push to its limits throughout the poem and towards its unsettling conclusion.
DeLay picks up this thread and moves out of the surreal and into an intimate space with “Baby Talk,” and although her poem feels more lucid in the speaker guides us, the repetition keeps the reader off-balance and asking questions, and DeLay expertly weaves personal and political in a counterpoint to Santalucia’s work. Robin Wang’s “water memory,” gives us a minimalism, in contrast to the first two poems, with Wang’s pared-down style, and even though Wang does connect narrative to the restrained language she provides, the emotion in these brief lines dives into deep and powerful places and connect on a new level. All three of these poems are exceptional, and we at Frontier are so glad to be able to share them with all of you.
A Last Look at Merwin, Stevens, and Williams
by Nicole Santalucia
by Robin Wang
my grandfather is sitting
with his feet in the water,
reaching for the fog that
curls on its flat plane.
in this dream, i can see
all the poems i’ve been trying
to write, can see a title and a body,
him flickering before he dies.
beneath us: salt reaching
for salt, stalks bowing
to stalks. in a softer poem,
i compare this place
to heaven. he stretches,
endless. a seabird
lands on a red rowboat
and i take his photo for the last time,
wet around the edges
where i’ve held it.
Connect with Nicole Santalucia through her Instagram at @n_santalucia or her Twitter (X) at @n_santalucia.
Kate DeLay is a poet from Tennessee. Her work can be found or forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Kate is a 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, the winner of the 2023 William Matthews Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss, and a 2024 Djanikian Scholars Finalist. A former Editor of Black Warrior Review, Kate is in her fourth and final year of the University of Alabama’s MFA Creative Writing program. Find her at katedelaypoet.com.
Robin Wang is a poet from Canada. Her work has appeared in Vagabond City Lit, SOFTBLOW, the Eunoia Review, and more. Her manuscript bildungsroman was selected as a finalist for the Swan Scythe Press Chapbook contest.
