Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Lloyd Schwartz
For a long poem or a sequence
Denise Provost, “Threads of Distant Music: A Garland of Sonnets”
Honorable mention: Daisy Bassen, “Kintsukoroi”
Honorable mention: Simon Peter Eggertsen, “Hawking Reduces Relativity, My Father and I Extend Ancestry in the Language of Theoretical Physics”
Honorable mention: Susan Sklan, “To My Most Beloved Child: Letters From the Warsaw Ghetto”
Judge’s note:
Long poems are by their very nature ambitious undertakings. So I was not exactly surprised to read a series of unusually ambitious, skillful, sometimes delightful and often moving poems. It was my good fortune that one stood out, “Threads of Distant Music: A Garland of Sonnets.” This was both technically and emotionally the most ambitious of all the poems I read. A crown of sonnets is a real challenge under any circumstances, with the last line of each sonnet transformed into the first line of the next, until the final—fifteenth—sonnet begins with the last line of the fourteenth sonnet and, coming full circle, ends with the final line of the first. But “Threads of Distant Music” is not merely a technical marvel. It’s practically a novel in verse, a multi-generational family saga that I found consistently gripping, eloquent, inventive, and deeply moving—no place more so than in the culminating line. I am thrilled to award “Threads of Distant Music” the 2021 New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize.
Amy Lowell Prize, selected by Toni Bee
For an outstanding poem in any form or style by a poet with strong ties to New England
Katherine M. Clarke “Consider the Fingers”
Honorable mention: Susanna Hargreaves. “Boylston Street”
E.E. Cummings Prize, selected by C. Prudence Arceneaux
For a compelling, lyrical, or experimental poem up to 21 lines
Diana Der-Hovanessian Prize, selected by Jean Dany Joachim
For a translation
Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella, “Allergy” from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets
Honorable mention: Christopher Hirschmann Brandt, “Twin Poems” from the Spanish of Eduardo Hurtado
Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by Heather Treseler
For a chapbook published in the last two years
Kendra DeColo and Tyler Mills, Low Budget Movie
Honorable mention: Chelsea Bunn, Forgiveness
Honorable mention: Dujie Tahat, Salat
Judge’s note:
In poems fierce, nervy, and unflinchingly smart, DeColo and Mills invoke the conceit of a low budget film, an independent movie made without the backing of a major Hollywood studio, to skewer misogyny in all its inflections and innuendoes—on cinema and television screens as well as in our lived lives. Poems such as “What to Wear to Report Your Stalker to HR” rivet the reader in their reach and surprise, recuperating autonomy from scenes of harassment, objectification, and casual cruelty in the donut shop and gas station, the fortune-teller’s forecast and the stalker in the freezer aisle. What does it mean to be female in the twenty-first century, and where can women inhabit their desires? DeColo and Mills intervene in received cultural (and lyric) discourses, laying claim to the convictions of tenderness, opening “the heart to a slice of the largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos.”
Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, selected by the New England Poetry Club Board
For a full-length manuscript published in the last two years
Nehassaiu deGannes, Music for Exile
Karla Kelsey, Blood Feather
Honorable mention: Dan Beachy-Quick, Arrows
Honorable mention: Shanta Lee Gander, Ghettoclaustrophobia
Honorable mention: Paul Nemser, A Thousand Curves