2025 Family & Home Prize SECOND PLACE WINNER: “all the men i love carry pocketknives” By Emily Clarke
Frontier Poetry is excited to congratulate Sean Hill’s pick for the SECOND PLACE winner of the 2025 Family & Home Prize: “all the men i love carry pocketknives“ by Emily Clarke.
“do you know anything about manhood?”—a question that haunts the poem and the speaker’s commentary on Native men. In Clarke’s work, while the men scream, apologize, climb, and clink clang, the women labor: carrying the trash sacks of shattered men, accepting heavy apologies, and being offered up from wounds not of their making. Clarke’s subtle distinction between action and labor, between men and women, highlights the emotional burden borne silently by the latter—carried with dignity, obscurity, and love. Her work captures an ecosystem of grief and family with both compassion and unflinching clarity.
Read her poem below.
all the men i love carry pocketknives
Emily Clarke
Emily Clarke is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and a Scorpio, traditional Bird Dancer, and avid believer in reading for pleasure. She is also a recipient of Hayden’s Ferry Review’s National Indigenous Poets Prize, as well as a beadwork artist and community programmer. Her current obsessions include thinking deeply about writing a new poem but never actually putting pen to paper, the color pink, 1000-page-long Romantasy novels, and making beaded earrings inspired by her favorite aesthetics. Emily strives to create work that serves as a personal and community-conscious representation of Indigenous femininity. When she is not writing poems or organizing various events, she can be found surrounded by beads, sparkly lip gloss, and cat hair.
