Literary awards

Poetry awards Juried by Dr. Zach Linge

Zach Linge is a visiting professor at Meredith College. Linge’s poems appear in The Atlantic, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals, and they have been reprinted in Best New Poets (2020) and Second Last Call: Poems of Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande, forthcoming), among other anthologies. Linge’s manuscript, EVERYTHING EVERYTHING, was a finalist for the 2023 Bergman Prize, judged by Nobel Prize-winner Louise Glück.

1st Place

A Recipe for Housekeeping | by Chanelle Allesandre| page 47

This abecedarian catches my attention with its first word, the dismissive “Anyhow” that suggests the reader and the speaker of the poem may be mid-conversation, which is an engaging and interesting first move: to rhetorically signal both the reader’s role in the poem (as conversationalist? as somebody listening in as the speaker makes up their mind?) and something about the speaker’s state of mind. Some event precedes the moment of this poem’s opening; something worth discussing has happened before the poem begins. As such, what follows—speculation on the import of a broom’s falling (a portent?), the cosmological contextualization of the event, and the worldbuilding through witchery—is important, but it is not the poem’s central concern: as a spell is cast with the intent to impact the world, so, too, does this poem work within the limits of its form, not as an end in itself, but as a magic written with the intent to point outward, beyond the page, the poem, and the poet, out into the world—and perhaps beyond.

2nd Place

On Growing Up | by Morgan Maddocks | page 17

What “On Growing Up” does best is trust its speaker’s sensibilities. This is a sprawling poem, though also a formal one, and its psychological logic works in tandem with the limitations of its form to push up and against possibility. The voice’s texture is rich with run-ons that evoke a sort of frantic, impatient, disturbed consideration of its subject: “adulthood,” that “scary enough” stage in which, as the poet writes, “You navigate life pretending to have it all together, feigning confidence and dodging every / Zig and zag.” The delight this poem finds, however, is in exactly those zigs and zags, as, with each line break, the reader too is delighted to find surprise in each turn in the poem’s considerations, each turn in the poem’s voice: “it is storming, you are suddenly alone,and,” the poet writes, “God dammit, you wish you had someone.”

Honorable Mention

Rain | by Constance Wesley | page 65

An honest joy to read, especially for its strong command of musicality, “Rain” is a poem that delights the way a playground rhyme delights: with a concrete, physical sense of meter. From its first, rhyming, metered lines (“Soft patter / steady roar / caught in a / downpour”) through to its playful conclusion, the poem gives its reader something to jump rope to; hopscotch; or jot down on a scrap of paper and pull out for a rainy day.