Thank you all for making this such a wonderful contest this year. Our judges—Don Share, Nicole Sealey, and Matthew Zapruder—have chosen the winning poem and the second and third place poems each tied for second place with the same score.…
Arn’s “The Salesman” shows all the qualities of a good contemporary sonnet, the perennial form: the subtle bending rhymes inside and ending the lines, the compact story, the lines that break rhythm and syntax with purpose, and the well-timed, twisting…
Amy LeBlanc’s poem “Wintering” is a master of the short line—trembling and damaged bodies laid across four syllables. We’re enthralled by the pressed imagery, the slant rhymes, the wish for peace. Wintering he torched the skin that i’m still in.…
By the second pair of lines, the gentle hiding of men in flowers, we were hooked to this poem. Babette Cieskowski’s language blooms in delicate song: the shucked pearls, the blood root, the windowsill—”Dream With Ex-Lover In Red” is a…
Thomas Nguyen’s poem makes of the readers own body a delicate collection of pine needles and mud. With greens and blacks and marbled whites, “mythologies” reveals a world dark, haunting—we’re all, by the end, thirsty with prayer. mythologies &…
We are so pleased to share with you all that Susan Yanos has been chosen as our New Voices Fellow. She started writing poetry in her 50s, and her work displays an exceptional closeness to contemporary poetry, our collective movements…
This pair of poems by Asa Drake offer a harmony unique to themselves—one magnifying the other, and both about love, both filled out with Drake’s assured confidence in the strange. The Wasp Doesn’t shelter herself in work. Who is…
Charles Kell’s poetic missive leaps across associative gaps with subtle ease, tip toes through history, through violence. “Oblivion Letter” is all dark corners and boys named Night and is a little scary, to be honest—eyes gazing across the couplets like…
Kai Carlson-Wee’s single stanza poem lands on the page with weight and space and time. “Mental Health” works to unfold the banality of medicated routine, while never losing sight of the drugs that punctuate its hours, or the slow fog…
Duncan Slagle pins his body to these poems, without seeking right or wrong—everything turns on the body. From the beautiful ghazal, to the simple couplets, Slagle shows a range of both voice and technique, with a consistent painful imagery threading…
