Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
For a long poem or a sequence
Jennifer Freed, “Cerebral Hemorrhage”
Honorable mention: Richard Fein, “Las Meninas”
Honorable mention: Moira Linehan, “Accounting”
Amy Lowell Prize, selected by Dzvinia Orlowsky
For an outstanding poem in any form or style by a poet with strong ties to New England
Stephan Delbos, “Poem for Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and the Sea Serpent of Plymouth Bay”
Ellin Sarot, “O Lord, We Are Aware of Our Iniquity and the Iniquity of Our Fathers”
Honorable mention: Barbara Boches, “To ESOL Instructors: For Their Safety—You will Refer to Domestic Abuse Survivors By Flower Names”
Honorable mention: Jennifer Edwards, “I’m Trying”
Judge’s note:
Ellin Sarot’s rhythmic, bristling language is compelling; Stephan Delbos’s humorous, surreal narrative has real charm. Sarot’s “O Lord,We are Aware of Our Iniquity and the Iniquity of Our Fathers” takes greater risk, inviting mystery; but I welcome the joyful clarity of Delbos’s “Poem for Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and the Sea Serpent of Plymouth Bay.” Both show literary influence—Hopkins & Dylan/Ginsberg—in very different ways.
E.E. Cummings Prize, selected by Susan Donnelly
For a compelling, lyrical, or experimental poem up to 21 lines
Monica Raymond, “After the Fire”
Honorable mention: Barbara Boches, “Carolina Silverbell”
Honorable mention: Alice Kociemba, “watch the stars that tremble with love and with hope”
Judge’s note:
“After the Fire” – I kept returning to “After the Fire” as I read through the contest entries. Each time the poem impressed me anew with its rich language, powerful imagery, mystery, and the not-quite-revealed human story behind it. There are many great phrases here; I consider the final stanza particularly fine. This poem packs a lot of drama into 20 lines.
“Carolina Silverbell” – This poem’s skillful use of double metaphor throughout is very effective: the plant growing like a child, the child/offspring growing, and thriving or not, like a plant. There’s also a lively and confident word-use in the poem: “she jiggered out,” “the razzle/dazzle of breakers.”
“watch the stars that tremble with love and with hope” – I admire the economy and simple humanity with which the poem describes Italy’s tragic pandemic crisis. It makes a moving use of Puccini’s line from Turandot, both in the text in Italian, and in the title, translated into English. The love and hope becomes part of the whole nation under the stars.
Diana Der-Hovanessian Prize, selected by María Luisa Arroyo
For a translation
Hagop Merjian, “The City” from the Greek of C. P. Cavafy’s poem
Judge’s note:
The translator of C.P. Cavafy’s poem is a poet who understands how to recreate compelling sonic resonance and fluid tonal shifts in English that honor the music, cadence, language and tone in the original Greek. Here, the translator captures Cavafy’s sparing, direct language with his rare use of adjectives and unflinchingly forward diction. While I celebrate all the translations submitted this year, I returned repeatedly to this translation, “The City”. Every time I did, I marveled at a new discovery. For instance, on the page, read the last words of every line. There, you will discover as I did another dissonant angle of despair in the first stanza and in the second, a sense of feeling spiritually lost at home. The future imperative tone in the second stanza forecasts a reality fraught with self-sabotaging spiritual ruin, the ruin that is directly quoted by a “you” in the first stanza. That narrator seeks escape from “the ashes of my life here/Where I have ruined, spent, wrecked my years.” Hauntingly memorable and worthy of the translation prize!
Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes
For a chapbook published in the last two years
Heather Treseler, Parturition
Honorable mention: Nickole Brown, The Donkey Elegies
Honorable mention: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Letters From the Interior
Judge’s note:
Born of loss and longing, the poems in Heather Treseler’s chapbook Parturition—a medical term for childbirth—embody Yeats’s idea of “passionate syntax for passionate subject matter.” As she explores birth in various guises (the imagined birth of a child, the birth of insight, the birth of yearning), she simultaneously reveals how the attempt to verbalize the experience of “step[ping] beyond self and hunger” becomes a kind of parturition. I was mesmerized by her intricate layering of phrases and clauses to convey, extend, qualify, and complicate thought and feeling. Artful and sensuous, her sentences are “doors that open to rapture or // metaphor: a chance to be momentarily carried across into somewhere, something, someone else.” I keep returning to these verses she has mothered, and I am honored to select this collection, her labor of love, for the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, selected by the New England Poetry Club Board
For a full-length manuscript published in the last two years
Sara London, Upkeep
Honorable mention: Eileen Cleary, Child Ward of the Commonwealth
Honorable mention: Richard Foerster, Boy On A Doorstep
Honorable mention: Carol Hobbs, New-found-land