Xiao Yue Shan is the winner of the Chapbook Contest!
Congratulations to our winner, Xiao Yue Shan! Thank you to all the finalists and submitters for making this such a beautifully difficult choice this year.
“How Often I Have Chosen Love”
by Xiao Yue Shan
Xiao Yue Shan’s collection of poems are an intimate dispatch for a world presently terrified of intimacy, a reminder of humanity in the face of violence and history and dislocation. Her work strides gracefully between many worlds, the uban and the rural, between generations, between cities and cultures—trying always to choose love, she says,
in the chestnut of november
when the night cracks open and is yellow
and the dusk lifts the city up towards mid-air
how it stays there
oscillating and trembling
grasped in the palm-sized wind
For these reasons, Xiao Yue Shan has won the $2000 prize and we are incredibly excited to work with her on bringing this beautiful collection to the world and our readers.
—Josh Roark, Editor of Frontier Poetry
Xiao Yue Shan (单小月) is a poet and essayist born in Dongying, China and living in Tokyo, Japan. Her poems have appeared in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Grain Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review, and her prose work is forthcoming in the Shanghai Literary Review. Find her at shellyshan.com.
