Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by Jennifer Jean
Naomi Mulvihill was a Margaret Murphy endowed fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her chapbook, We All Might Be (Factory Hollow Press), won the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editor’s Choice Selection. Her first full length volume of poems, The Knife Thrower’s Girl, was awarded the 2022 Washington Prize (The Word Works). Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Cimarron, West Branch and others, and featured in Verse Daily. She received the Page Davidson Clayton Prize for “Poly-, Ambi-” as the best poem appearing in the Michigan Quarterly Review by an emerging poet in 2022. She is a veteran bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools.
Selections from We All Might Be SEA OF CRISIS A steamer burned and capsized one October, setting loose its cargo of apples and people— material for a parable. One November, a mongrel named Laika, launched on an elliptical orbit, circled my parents before they were my parents. Dead only a few hours into her journey, she spun weightless, an idea realized. Someone said, If a dog, then a man, so we had men in a quarter million mile thrall snapping photos of their own planet with Hasselblads. They read Genesis televised. The whole world was aboard. My parents, by now, had waded six years in. Off air, the astronauts horse-traded bacon squares and beef bites laughingly but something was different. One said, back where the earth used to be and the words filled with epigraphic reverb. Apples and people— what I know grows infinitesimal in my dory. I row facing land, my back to where I’m going. Of Laika, we know hardly anything at all. Part terrier, part husky, life in a sequence of smaller and smaller cages prepared her for outer space. OTHER SONG OF MYSELF To the one who’s ingested an open safety pin, ribs, louver-like, letting in the x-ray’s blue evanescence, a softness against which the metal tenses (call this a case of a sharpness safer swallowed); to the one covered in spurs and galls for whom everything hurts —the curtain’s white muslin, the muted tick of steel down the hall; to the shirtless girl whose heart holds her body ransom and the boy who arches his back and laughs when there’s nothing to laugh at; in bewildered recognition of the throng we are and are not supposed to be, the teeming entirety; to wryneck and blindness of various kinds; to every sort of fleshly extravagance, mix-and-match genital ensemble bulge and twist: Welcome. POLY-, AMBI- I’m writing a book where there’s a blessing for each thing, even Shredded Wheat, even an earthquake. When I try to figure it out, silence snows me in. On a song, there’s a bird in the yard that won’t decide. Mocks them all—gull, jay, car alarm. There’s the man who leaps off a cliff in a wingsuit and a mole that hunts the dunes by seismic cues. As fast as a path opens ahead, the sand collapses. Tiny stranger, alien multitude— the only baby I ever made came at the end of the third month. Outside the first blades of grass vent themselves along cracks in the asphalt. Under a privet, violets condense in the shadows’ overlap. Matter and its absence, the bird sings. Bless the unknowable. Bless the implausible. Bless the ambivalent.