The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37) projects a mass resurrection of bones and death for the prophet Ezekiel—an incomprehensibly bold prophecy in today’s after-Auschwitz world, and one with which Sean McQuinney wrestles beautifully to find his voice…
Jessica Fischoff’s mythic poem leans into divinated romance, star-spoken inevitability. “The Fortune Teller” speaks with few lines, but pulls the wide galactic into the palm, the body. We want the fortune to be real. The Fortune Teller Give me…
Mark Wagenaar’s “Migrations”—a thundering, contemplative silence after the final period. Wagenaar has masterfully crafted a vital epic for our times, and the $5000 prize for 1st Place in our 2018 OPEN is well-earned. Migrations Sparrow, I answer, when our…
Honored to share the two runner-ups to the 2018 Frontier OPEN: Elizabeth Oxley has won 2nd place and Sam Zafris 3rd! Expelling Venus by Elizabeth Oxley When the doctor says he’ll need to remove my ovaries, I consider performing a…
First, a sincere thank you to all the finalists for partnering with us. All of these poems deserve high praise, featuring work by Jocelyn Williams, Korey Williams, Hillary Martin, K.A. Jagai, and Oriana Ivy. E.D. Watson is also a finalist,…
Jenny Shen’s power in “preparing an elegy” rises as invitation to familial intimacy—the poem rolls forward like a stream of consciousness and captures a mother and her daughter in a fragile moment, in the kitchen, in a conversation with so…
Claire Eder sets the stage in “Anniversary” for “ordinary love”—a performance both endearing and familiar. Whose body has not been softened by illegal chemicals? Or trembled by illicit confession? Or soaked in the long river of “ordinary love?” Anniversary…
Choosing the winner last year was both incredibly difficult, and impossibly simple. The mission of the contest was never to produce a collection that would need to turn a profit, but simply to identify the strongest work by an emerging…
“Not Evening Now”—a poem of memory and the wet Florida air—is true joy in the mouth. Sound puts the meat on imagery, on memory, and Henry Brooks has invited us to feast in his night gazebo. Not Evening Now…
Poetry has always endeavored to create a space where land and body can reveal their unity, political and otherwise—Isabel Acevedo’s poem swims in this tradition. With “May 2018, Puerto Rico,” she’s invited us into that very specific pain of May…
