Award-Winning Poems 2006
Winter 2006-07
HER GRAVE
by David Groff
Winner of the 2005 Meridian Editors' Prize
Entries must be received by December 20
Prestigious award from the University of Virginia's literary journal offers $1,000 each for fiction and poetry; enter online only. In this poem, a visit to his mother's grave sets off a series of harsh reflections on how our memories of loved ones are so often limited to superficial traits that death quickly erases.
RECOVERY
by Lynne Knight
Winner of the 2006 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 23
This competitive award from the Poetry Society of America offers $500 for a lyric poem on a humanitarian theme. Open to members only (we recommend joining). Knight shows us a starving pioneer family's odyssey through the eyes of a child who is innocent enough to perceive beauty and wonder as well as pain in her family's journey into the unknown. In an intriguing twist, the poem ends with the speaker urging the child's descendant, who is recovering from an illness (possibly anorexia), to choose life and eat.
A SUITABLE GUEST
by Knute Skinner
Winner of the 2004 Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award
Postmark Deadline: December 30
This $500 prize for poetry chapbook manuscripts includes publication by an independent press that favors experimental and offbeat work. Skinner's cryptic, playful poem, selected from his chapbook The Other Shoe, describes breakfast with a lover who is never more remote than when he is being most generous.
MOOD RING
by Jaswinder Bolina
Winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 12
This competitive open manuscript prize offers $1,500 and publication by a university press that is friendly to experimental poetry. Bolina's first book, carrier wave, won the 2006 award, judged by Lyn Hejinian. The neurotic narrator of this wry poem imagines a small donkey inside him who teaches him to inhabit his own body more spontaneously.
WARM CANTO
by Ron Slate
Winner of the 2006 Levis Reading Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 15
Free contest from Virginia Commonwealth University offers $1,000 for a first or second book of poetry published during the preceding calendar year. Slate's prizewinning book, The Incentive of the Maggot, was the second winner in a row whose book also won the Bakeless Prize, a prestigious first-book contest. In this stark poem, a dragonfly's pursuit of its prey during a stupefying heat wave mirrors the narrator's helplessness in the face of his friend's illness and death.
Fall 2006
POSTHUMOUS
by Jean Nordhaus
Winner of the 2006 Journal Award in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This prestigious open manuscript contest offers $3,000 and publication by Ohio State University Press. This poem from Nordhaus' prizewinning book Innocence looks at junk mail addressed to her dead mother, first as an unwelcome irony, then as a reflection on how her mother's generosity echoes beyond her lifetime.
TILT
by Renato Rosaldo
Winner of the 2005 Many Mountains Moving Literary Award for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 30
Colorado-based literary journal offers $200 apiece for poetry and flash fiction; emerging writers welcome. In "Tilt," his first published poem, Rosaldo, a cultural anthropologist, relies on his gift for detailed observation to orient himself after a stroke, in a hospital atmosphere that threatens to break patients' identities down to mechanical parts.
AN OCCURRENCE OF GRACE AT A BARTOK CONCERT
by George Looney
Winner of the 2002 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize for Fiction, Essay & Poetry (Missouri Review)
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Prizes of $3,000 apiece for poetry, fiction and essays, plus publication in one of the finest literary journals. Observing a disabled woman at a classical concert prompts the poet to reflect how beauty and pain are two sides of the same coin.
DEATH SHALL NOT DEFINE US and other poems
by Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Co-winner of the 2005 Kinereth Gensler Award
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Alice James Books offers two prizes of $2,000 and publication for a poetry manuscript by a resident of New York State, New Jersey or New England. This selection from Pecqueur's prizewinning book The Case Against Happiness unites a shoe clerk and his customer in a moment of absurd recognition of mortality, ending on a note of hope that what is real will win out over the manufactured and perishable.
SAPPHO ON THE EDGE OF THE BAYOU
by Anna Journey
Winner of the 2005 Wabash Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by October 1
$1,000 prize for unpublished poems from Sycamore Review, the literary journal of Purdue University. In Journey's prizewinning poem, a woman makes peace with her lover's decision to marry a man, as the decayed beauty of the bayou points the way for love to coexist with an acceptance of its transience.
ROLES
by Cathy Park Hong
Winner of the 2006 Barnard College New Women Poets Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 15
Competitive award for poetry manuscripts by US women with one published book includes $1,500 and publication by W.W. Norton & Co. In this poem by the author of the prizewinning Dance Dance Revolution, a Korean tour guide's polyglot patois mimics the superficial cosmopolitanism of the tourists she serves, whose chosen rootlessness seems like a heartless luxury in light of her own feelings of exile.
HOW TO BECOME A MEMBER
by Geoff Bouvier
Winner of the 2005 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
One of the top awards for poetry manuscripts by US authors with no published books, offering $3,000 and publication by Copper Canyon Press. This brief, satirical poem excerpted from Bouvier's prizewinning Living Room suggests how easily the herd instinct can co-opt our supposedly original modes of self-expression.
Summer 2006
1652
by Sally Ball
Winner of the 2004 Barrow Street Press Book Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Prestigious $1,000 award for poetry manuscripts is sponsored by a well-regarded literary journal that is friendly to experimental work. This richly textured selection from Ball's prizewinning book Annus Mirabilis pictures the mathematician Leibniz as a child vainly seeking his mother's affection with a gift of sycamore leaves, whose underlying patterns, like her love, he glimpses but cannot quite grasp.
THE GIRL WHO WANTED TO SPEAK OTHER LANGUAGES
by Elizabeth Oakes
Winner of the 2004 Pearl Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: July 15
Poetry manuscript award from an attractive small press offers $1,000, publication and a foreword by contest judge, a well-known poet. This radiant poem from Oakes' prizewinning book The Farmgirl Poems imagines that all her experiences of farming—the "writing" of hoofprints around the pond, the "notes" of hay hanging in the barn air like music—are the world's secret languages, which she risks forgetting when she moves into a more isolated urban life.
THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT ON A WOMAN'S BODY—AFTER OVERFLOW BY ANDREW WYETH
by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
Winner of the 2005 Robert Frost Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
Award for poems "in the spirit of Robert Frost" offers $1,000 and a featured reading at the Frost Festival in Lawrence, Mass. Willett's meditative poem imagines the thoughts of Helga, the artist's nude model, as the sounds of the artist at work become one with the sounds of nature and the sensations of her body. Rather than being a mere subject of male attention, she actively brings to the painting her creative energy as the locus where art and nature meet.
CANON 501
by Brian Swann
Winner of the 2005 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
Well-regarded poetry manuscript contest for US authors offers $1,000 and publication by Pleiades Press. In this poem from Swann's prizewinning collection Snow House, travelers in Alaska are unsettled by their inability to shape their experiences into a coherent whole, whether on film or in words. The birdsong "drifting while we drifted" is one of many things "not quite right"; even the sea "sounded obscure/as if it had no shape and was empty."
SINKHOLES
by Geoffrey Brock
Winner of the 2004 New Criterion Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
Competitive $3,000 award for a poetry manuscript that "pays close attention to form," from a venerable journal of arts and culture with a conservative, high-modernist, New Formalist perspective. This poem from Brock's prizewinning first collection Weighing Light pays homage to our fascination with disaster, the "sexy patina/Of danger" that jolts us out of our meagre, practical existence into a world of awe and mystery.
NIGHT AND DAY and other poems
by Roxane Beth Johnson
Winner of the 2005 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 30
Prestigious manuscript prize from California State University Fresno offers $1,500 and publication by Anhinga Press, a leading poetry publisher. Johnson's prizewinning collection Jubilee is her first published book. A film-noir feel pervades this selection of her poems, a bittersweet melange of lost lovers, vanishing cigarette smoke and almost-forgotten songs.
Spring 2006
FILIPINEZA
by Bino A. Realuyo
Winner of the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Recommended manuscript contest offers $1,000 and publication by the University of Utah Press. "In the modern Greek dictionary, the word 'Filipineza' means 'maid'," the author tells us in the epigraph. This unsettling poem forces us to confront the economic and erotic connections that must remain unspoken in the encounter between these two cultures. This poem is from Realuyo's prizewinning book, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door.
DEEP-SEATED GRIEF and other poems
by Rachel Moritz
Winner of the 2005 Diagram Chapbook Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 1
Recommended chapbook contest from quirky multimedia magazine The Diagram offers $1,000 and publication. This selection from Moritz's prizewinning collection, The Winchester Monologues, combines the languages of the estate-sale catalogue, the philosophical lyric and the gothic tale to sketch the portrait of a woman who, like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, seems entombed in the museum of her own life.
RAW GOODS INVENTORY
by Emily Rosko
Co-winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30 (don't enter before April 1)
Recommended contest for poetry manuscripts offers publication by the prestigious University of Iowa Press. Recent winners have leaned toward the experimental end of the poetry spectrum. This title poem from Rosko's prizewinning collection takes us on a manic tour through childhood sensations, the stink and beauty of nature, and the mind's alluring but unsatisfying abstractions, as the speaker tries to cobble together a permanent self from the junkyard of her memories.
FAR AWAY LAKE
by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Winner of the 2004 FIELD Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31 (don't enter before May 1)
Highly recommended contest from prestigious poetry journal FIELD offers $1,000 and publication by Oberlin College Press. This finely crafted poem from Goldberg's prizewinning collection Lie Awake Lake expresses longing for an elusive place of beauty that lies on the other side of sleep, and perhaps of death.
THE FIFTH FACT
by Sarah Browning
Winner of the 2005 People Before Profits Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 1 (formerly April 1)
Neutral contest offers $200 and anthology publication for a poem that "inspires others to value human life and the natural world instead of values based on short-term economic advantage." In this incisive poem, a school project on African-American heroes stirs the child's mother to observe how poverty and injustice still exist alongside memorials to "all those heroes under our feet."
