Award-Winning Poems 2010
Winter 2010-11
COCHITI LAKE, 1989
by Sawnie Morris
Winner of the 2010 George Bogin Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
This $500 prize, part of the Poetry Society of America's prestigious annual award series, seeks a selection of 4-5 poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. Here, Morris reminisces about a nighttime swim in a lake that the lovers do not know is polluted with trace metals. Juxtaposing mythic and natural images with forbidding technical terms, the fractured form of the poem mimics the disruption of the environment.
MIGRATION
by Karen Solie
Co-winner of the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: December 31
The Griffin Poetry Prize awards two annual prizes of $65,000, one for a book of original or translated poetry first published in Canada, the other for a book published anywhere in the world. Books must be in English, and first published in the year in which the deadline falls. Karen Solie's Pigeon won the Canadian prize for 2010 (deadline in 2009). This poem treasures the faint signs of life's renewal in cold northern towns where harsh weather, debt, and personal losses have accumulated.
THE LIONESS
by Stuart M. Anderson
Winner of the 2010 Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred
Entries must be received by December 31
This free contest in honor of contemplative Christian writer Thomas Merton offers a top prize of $500 and publication for an unpublished poem of 100 lines maximum that "expresses, directly or indirectly, a sense of the holy or that, by its mode of expression, evokes the sacred." Anderson's winning poem takes the point of view of an aging predator who is frustrated that she cannot seize her desired knowledge of the divine as she might pounce on a zebra or antelope.
THE ADULT LONGEING GUIDE
by Zach Savich
Winner of the 2010 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 14
This prestigious, competitive open poetry manuscript prize offers $2,000 and publication by Colorado State University. In recent years, this contest has been friendly to experimental work. Zach Savich's Annulments won the 2010 award. In this wide-ranging, playful poem, the intriguing title of an equestrian guidebook prompts a series of free associations that all circle back to this question: whether "art demands faith in order" or whether an interesting randomness is all we can hope for.
HOUSE FIRE AS BILDUNGSROMAN and other poems
by Quan Barry
Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry: AWP Award Series
Postmark Deadline: February 28 (don't enter before January 1)
This high-profile contest offers $5,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press for a poetry manuscript. Barry's Water Puppets won the 2010 award. These elliptical, energetic poems investigate how the self can be reduced to its essential elements (if such indeed exist) as a response to transience and destruction. As one poem ends, "please think of me as a space."
STARK ROOM
by Shane Book
Winner of the 2009 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 15 (don't enter before January 15)
This competitive award from a prestigious literary journal offers $3,000 and publication by University of Nebraska Press for a full-length poetry collection. There is also a prize for a short fiction collection, same rules and deadline. Book's Ceiling of Sticks won the 2009 award. This surreal poem about heartsickness for a lost lover moves at a headlong, nightmarish pace, but is held together by the structure of the pantoum, a challenging poetic form based on repetition of lines.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EPITAPH (INSPIRED BY EMILY DICKINSON)
by Sarah Marx
Winner of the 2010 Writecorner Press Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: March 31
This attractive award from a writers' resource site offers a top prize of $500 and web publication. In her winning poem, the 17-year-old author expresses affinity with Dickinson in finding imaginative nourishment and relief from loneliness in the small objects that furnish domestic life.
Fall 2010
PORTMANTERRORISM
by Nick Lantz
Winner of the 2010 Felix Pollak Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This prestigious open manuscript contest offers $1,000 and publication by the University of Wisconsin Press. In this poem from his prizewinning collection The Lighting That Strikes the Neighbors' House, Lantz satirizes our culture's glib overproduction of consumer goods and the trendy neologisms used to sell them. Like George Orwell, he draws a connection between our jumbled, decontextualized language and our willful ignorance of political dangers.
EPITHALAMIUM
by Dorine Jennette
Winner of the 2008 National Poetry Review Book Prize Series
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This open poetry manuscript prize offers $500 and publication for work that exhibits "memorability, innovation, and joie de vivre". Jennette's collection Urchin to Follow won the 2008 award. An epithalamium is a poem written in honor of a wedding. Here, Jennette's quiet focus on the lakeside setting, rather than the bride and groom, creates a sense of the reverence and mystery of marriage vows.
LATER THEY CALL THE MOVERS and other poems
by Shannon Amidon
Co-winner of the 2009 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Annual Poetry Prizes
Entries must be received by October 16
The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund offers large prizes, including several top awards of $5,000, and web publication for short lyric poems based on personal experience that "celebrate the spirit of life". Entrants must be under 40. In Amidon's poems, the beauty of Hawaii and the love of her husband and son merge into an experience of luxurious joy.
ON DISSECTING THE BODY AND LUMBER
by Sandy Florian
Co-winner of the 2009 Elixir Poetry Book Awards
Postmark Deadline: October 31
This well-regarded independent press offers awards of $2,500 (Judge's Prize) and $1,500 (Editors' Prize), plus publication for the two winning manuscripts. Florian's Prelude to Air from Water won the 2009 Editors' Prize. This unsettling prose-poem thrives on the tension between two competing but equally true-to-life ways of experiencing the body: as a wondrous enigma, and as an object of invasive scientific inquiry.
DREAM WITH FLOWERS AND BOWL OF FRUIT
by Deborah Warren
Winner of the 2008 Richard Wilbur Award
Postmark Deadline: December 1
The University of Evansville offers this $1,000 poetry manuscript prize for American poets in even-numbered years. Entries may include some public-domain or permission-secured translations. Like the contest's namesake, previous winners of this award have also been established translators and writers of formal poetry. In this title poem from Warren's winning book, the title epitomizes the pretty and safe subjects of traditional poetry, while the speaker's demand for a more exciting subconscious life indicates that she's no more fond of these clichés than we are.
THE CARRIAGE
by Liya Person-Rechtman
Winner of the 2010 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22 (don't enter before October 1)
The Poetry Society of America offers this high-profile award of $250 for a poem by a US high school student. "The Carriage" combines the slapstick violence and humor of a cartoon, and the fast-paced metamorphoses of a dream, to express the excitement and anxiety of the female body and its social self-presentation.
Summer 2010
IN DEFENSE OF SMALL TOWNS
by Oliver de la Paz
Winner of the 2009 Akron Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
This competitive award offers $1,500 and book publication by the University of Akron Press. In this evocative poem from his prizewinning collection Requiem for an Orchard, the poet feels nostalgic despite himself for the hardscrabble desert town of his childhood.
THE ROUTINE AFTER FORTY
by Jacqueline Berger
Winner of the 2009 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 30
This open poetry manuscript prize from a well-regarded independent press based in Pittsburgh offers $1,000 as an advance against royalties, plus a $1,500 travel grant to participate in the Autumn House Master Poets Series the following year. There is also a fiction prize with the same rules and deadline. In this poem from Berger's prizewinning book The Gift that Arrives Broken, the disquieting experience of undergoing a mammogram heightens the narrator's awareness of the bonds between women, both genetic and emotional.
HAMLET UNDERTAKES A COURSE OF ZOLOFT
by Lesley Wheeler
Winner of the 2009 Barrow Street Press Book Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
The sponsor of this $1,000 open poetry manuscript prize is friendly to experimental and cross-genre work. Wheeler's collection Heterotopia won the 2009 award. Whether expressed in modern or archaic terms, this poem suggests, depression can be a form of political resistance to the artificial happiness of a society that fears uncomfortable truths.
BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT
by Carolyn Creedon
Winner of the 2009 Happy Hour Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 1
California-based literary journal Alehouse offers prizes up to $1,000 for individual poems, plus publication for winner and runners-up. This surreal prose-poem in the voice of a young prostitute juxtaposes images of beauty and violence.
THE BLACK STONES
by Michael Shally-Jensen
Winner of the 2009 Literal Latte Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 15
This long-lived online literary journal based in Manhattan offers prizes up to $1,000 for unpublished poems. Shally-Jensen's plain-spoken yet haunting poem about our awareness of death responds to a 1978 poem on the same subject by Galway Kinnell, musing on what has changed in the past three decades and what remains universal.
Spring 2010
GLASS
by Indigo Moor
Winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: March 15
This prestigious poetry series offers $1,000 and publication for manuscripts by African-American poets with one published book. In this enticing excerpt from Moor's Through the Stonecutter's Window, memories of a seduction linger in every detail of a street that the narrator has "vowed never again to cross".
THE CIRCLE
by Fernand Michaud
Winner of the 2009 Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: March 31
This high-quality writers' resource website offers prizes up to $500 and online publication for unpublished poems. The tide-like rhythms and slant rhymes of Michaud's winning poem accentuate his theme of the recurring flow of time and connections between the generations.
SUPERSTITION
by Megan Snyder-Camp
Winner of the 2008 Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 15
This competitive poetry manuscript prize, offering $3,000 for a collection by an author with no more than one published book, is cosponsored by a leading independent press and the prestigious literary journal Crazyhorse. Snyder-Camp's The Forest of Sure Things won the 2008 award. This haunting poem, first published in AGNI, captures how children invest the world with magical attributes, both to thrill themselves with fear and to make sense of the real dangers around them.
AN EVENING PORCH
by Benjamin Vogt
Winner of the 2009 New Michigan Press/Diagram Chapbook Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 30
DIAGRAM, a quirky multimedia literary journal, offers $1,000 and publication for a poetry, prose, or hybrid-genre chapbook manuscript (all genres compete together). Vogt's I is to Vorticism won the 2009 prize. This restrained, lyrical collection of moments from a summer evening suggests that the deepest communication sometimes happens in the silences between people.
THE REAL WARNINGS ARE ALWAYS TOO LATE
by Rhett Iseman Trull
Winner of the 2009 Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: May 1
This well-established manuscript prize offers $2,000 for first or second books of poetry. In this humorous yet painfully tender poem from Trull's The Real Warnings, a sixteen-year-old girl imagines going back to the time of her conception and letting her parents know just how much trouble is in store for them.
WINTER MILK
by Jamie Morewood Anderson
Winner of the 2008 International Poetry Competition (Atlanta Review)
Postmark Deadline: May 7
This long-running award offers a $1,000 prize, plus publication for 20 finalists. Anderson's gorgeous pastoral invites the reader to experience the mystery and fragility of all animal life, including the human animal.
