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Award-Winning Poems: Fall 2016
Welcome to my Fall 2016 selection of award-winning poems, highlights from our contest archives, and the best new resources we've found for writers. These quarterly specials are included with your free Winning Writers Newsletter subscription.
In this issue: "Déraison" and "Le fou" by Émile Nelligan, illustrated and translated by Julian Peters.
—Jendi Reiter, Editor
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Deadline: September 30
TOM HOWARD/MARGARET REID POETRY CONTEST
14th year. We will award the Tom Howard Prize of $1,500 for a poem in any style or genre, and the Margaret Reid Prize of $1,500 for a poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. Ten Honorable Mentions will receive $100 each (any style). The top 12 entries will be published online. Length limit: 250 lines per poem. Entry fee: $10 per poem. Final judge: S. Mei Sheng Frazier, assisted by Jim DuBois. Submit online here.
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SO WILL THERE BE APPLES? and other poems
by Lucy Ingrams
Winner of the 2015 Manchester Writing Competition
Entries must be received by September 23
This contest from Manchester Metropolitan University is the UK's largest cash prize for unpublished poetry and short fiction, with top awards of 10,000 pounds in each genre. Ingrams' winning portfolio can be found on pages 27-31 of the prizewinners' booklet linked here. In these romantic poems, her breathless lines, rich with nature imagery, are reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She chases the fleeting moment when an encounter with beauty leaves us "stunned out of role, no longer lusting after somewhere else to be."
THE POLAR BEAR
by Jennifer Givhan
Winner of the 2015 Lascaux Prize in Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
Online journal The Lascaux Review gives this $1,000 award for individual poems, with anthology publication for the top 12. Previously published work accepted. First published in Rattle, this timely poem depicts a mother's anguish about protecting her black son from man-made dangers, both those he can see and those he is too young to understand.
TO SALT LAKE, LETTER REGARDING GENEALOGY and BELLUM
by Rio Cortez
Winner of the 2015 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize
Entries must be received by September 30
Established in 2015 to mark the 20th anniversary of Cave Canem, a literary organization supporting black poets, this $500 award gives publication by Jai-Alai Books, a writer's residency in Miami, and a featured reading at the O, Miami Poetry Festival. Black writers at any stage of their career may submit a chapbook manuscript. Cortez's winning book was I have learned to define a field as a space between mountains. In these incisive poems first published in The Offing, she writes her "bloodline" back into the history of the American frontier.
A WOMAN FROM THE INFANT MORTALITY REVIEW BOARD CALLS
by Amanda Newell
Winner of the 2015 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Carlow University in Pittsburgh sponsors this $1,000 prize for an unpublished poem by a US woman over 40 with no published full-length books in any genre. The winner also receives an expenses-paid trip to read at the university with contest judge Allison Hedge Coke. Newell's fierce, heart-wrenching poem shows a bereaved mother fighting for control of the narrative of her loss.
BEDTIME STORIES and others
by Sarah Sansolo
Winner of the Summer 2016 Sixfold Short Story and Poetry Awards
Entries must be received by October 24
This online journal gives quarterly prizes of $1,000 apiece to the short story and group of poems that win the most reader votes. Besides the modest entry fee, entrants are obligated to read, comment, and vote on 18 randomly assigned entries in their genre. Sansolo's ironic confessional poems are linked by themes of erotic desire and the myths that mask it.
Read more award-winning poems.
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Ellen LaFleche, a judge of the North Street Book Prize, explores the emotional life of a semi-cloistered nun in this chapbook from Tiger's Eye Press. Sister Beatrice serves on a jury, bakes bread in the convent kitchen, scatters her mother's ashes in the ocean, and reflects on her friendship with another nun. Order directly from Ms. LaFleche for $10 at
ElLaFleche@aol.com.
"The tides of the sacred feminine seek an outlet in the cloistered body of Sister Beatrice, a working-class mystic. The convent offers both refuge and confinement—the paradox of a women-ruled society where women must de-sexualize themselves. The ascetic environment cannot quench the vitality of Beatrice's imagination, which finds golden-faced gods in copper pans and lust's soft satisfaction in a raw quahog."
—Jendi Reiter, editor, Winning Writers, and author of Bullies in Love
Please enjoy "Bliss" and "Forbidden Fruit", sample poems from the chapbook.
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To slack:
1. to make loose, or less tense or taut, as a rope; loosen.
2. to become less tense or taut, as a rope; to ease off.
Ambition:
1. an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment.
A slacker:
1. a person without ambition.
2. a person who gives up the idea of ambition in order to become less tense or taut, and to make the world less tense.
Return of the Slacker: Original poetry by Jim DuBois
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Arthur Powers is judging this year's Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. His award-winning collection of short stories, A Hero for the People, is available on Amazon Kindle. Click to buy—just $0.99!
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 See our Books page for all of our recommended poetry, fiction, and nonfiction books.
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
i'm alive / it hurts / i love it
This poet's first full-length book transforms the raw material of emotions into visionary language without losing their sincerity and immediacy. The untitled short poems can be read as sections of a single long work, as journal entries, or as miniature worlds in their own right, composed of clouds and hormones and rain on the freeway and blood and mirrors. Each represents the daily choice to feel everything, though pain coexists with joy. Espinoza writes with honesty and wit about her life as a transgender woman who manages anxiety and depression.
Patrick Ryan Frank
THE OPPOSITE OF PEOPLE
Blank verse and loosely structured sonnets eloquently explore the yearnings we express through TV and movie archetypes. Sincerity and contrivance are not opposites here. The comedian, the stunt man, the late-night movie monster, and the bad-news blonde take their turns revealing the existential paradox of film: how it underscores the passage of time by freezing it on the screen, a fixed point against which we measure our real lives racing past like "a car with its brake lines cut". Frank's blend of wry conversational tone and formal meter harks back to W.H. Auden, but his aesthetic lineage is more Disney than Brueghel: "About violence they were never wrong,/the old cartoons."
Douglas Goetsch (now Diana Goetsch)
NAMELESS BOY
Like a Garrison Keillor monologue at the end of an evening, humorous riffs and tender anecdotes prove only partially effective at warding off a deep melancholy in this poet's third full-length collection. You can laugh at light verse such as "Pee on Your Foot", and a few pages later, be slain by the self-lacerating loneliness of "Forgiveness Poem". Sometimes the shift stuns you with surprise in the same poem, as when a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 1989's morning radio mix ends with the questioning of a worker's hopeless endurance, reminiscent of Philip Levine. In their unpretentious way, these narratives hope to heal the deepest wound of ordinary life: that of never really knowing the people close to us, or being known. Both this theme and the title seem to take on an additional significance from Goetsch's post-publication gender transition. The book closes with a delightful, multi-part
fantasy about names and whether they determine our destiny, the poem itself a gift for a boy who is named at the end.
Hubert & Kerascoët
BEAUTY
This memorable graphic novel is a tragicomic feminist fairy tale for adults, sketched in an effortless retro style with an earthy color palette suggestive of old storybooks. A troublemaking fairy grants a homely peasant girl's wish for supreme beauty, but the maiden soon finds that being a maddening object of desire is no safer than her old life of humiliation. Her reversals of fortune add up to a profound fable about power, illusion, and sexism.
Rajiv Mohabir
THE TAXIDERMIST'S CUT
Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for this ambitious, passionate debut poetry collection: a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. (Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana's sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida.) The poet is willing to lay his own veins bare in order to create an artifice that is painfully and beautifully true to life. This book won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize.
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At 45 years old, Earl Mills was married with five children, owned his own home, and worked for 25 years at the same company. Yet he had a secret that few others knew: he could not read.
His lack of reading skill was exposed when he was put on the spot at church one night when he was asked to read a Bible passage. No one knew he couldn't read except his wife. Earl says, "When you can't read, you keep it under a lock and a key and you let hardly anyone inside of that part of your life."
Earl sought the assistance of the Craven Literacy Council. When he went to them they assessed him at a second-grade reading level. He had trouble spelling words like girl and bird. With sheer determination he embarked on a three-year process of learning how to read. In addition to improving his literacy skills, Mills developed his ability to capture the frustrations and triumphs through his poetry. Today, he has published several books of poetry, including From Illiterate to Poet and From Illiterate to Author.
 Earl is now a passionate advocate for literacy. He recently attended the National ProLiteracy Conference in Charleston, South Carolina where he was asked to read a few of his inspiring poems to the audience of 500 literacy professionals. ProLiteracy is a national nonprofit that develops materials and programs for over 1,000 literacy member programs across the country. When people learn to read and write, they have the power to change their lives and their communities.
Read "Twenty Six Letters", a poem by Mr. Mills.
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Reprinted by kind permission of Julian Peters. Visit his website.
"At night he had visions, some radiant, some dreadful [...] Each of these dreams would take shape the next morning in lines scribbled by a feverish hand, and in which already, among the many strokes of brilliance, could be seen the monstrous mark of insanity."
—Louis Dantin, from his introduction to Émile Nelligan et son oeuvre ("Émile Nelligan and His Work") (1903)
Insanity
Yet now I have the vision of bleeding shadows
And of spirited horses stamping,
And it's like the shouts of hobos, hiccupping of children,
Wheezing of slow exhalations.
Tell me, from where do they come to me, all these hoarse hurricanes,
Furies of fifes or drums?
One might think it dragoons galloping through the village,
With helmets of a radiant murkiness...
The Madman
Gondolar! Gondolar!
You are no longer out on the road till very late.
They murdered the poor idiot,
They crushed him underneath a cart,
And then, after the idiot, the dog.
They made a big, big hole for them there.
Dies irae, dies illa
On your knees before that hole there!
On August 9th, 1899, Émile Nelligan, aged 19 years and 7 months, is interned in the asylum of Saint-Benoît-Joseph-Labre.
He would never write again.
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