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Winner of the 2009 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize:

Neil de la Flor for Almost Dorothy

(To read sample poems click here.)

Runners-up:

Rosalynde Vas Dias, Nathan Bartel, Art Zilleruelo and Francisco Guevara

Contest Judge: Forrest Gander

Finalists:

Arlene Ang, Rebecca Aronson, Anne Babson, Douglas Blazek, Jack Coulehan, Kimberly Davis, John Estes, Bernadette Geyer, Jamey Hecht, Carolyn Hembree, Matthew Hittinger,
Lesley Jenike, Cory McClellan, Luigi Monteferrante, Carrie Oeding, Deniz Perin, Richard Robbins,
Hugo Rodriguez, Sarah Wetzel Fishman, S. Scott Whitaker

Poets from fifteen countries plus the U.S. entered our contest this year. All manuscripts were read at least twice. According to the judges, the poetry quality was high. We thank you for letting us consider your manuscript and invite you to enter again next year.

Spring 2009 New Titles

Winner of the 2008 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

In Ways Impossible to Fold by Michael Rerick

“Ways that may have been impossible to fold, in successfully folding here, grow from impossibility to possibility. Every idea in this book is a fold understanding how to increase area and flexibility within apparent confines (as in pop-up books). As scale shifts, large and small scale blossoming, the heart, the pulse— moments fold and unfold in a dance of patterns in which we and everything that exists participate, as impossible as that can seem." —Contest Judge Thylias Moss

“The ceaseless deformations [of these poems] hover between organic and mannerist topologies. These terrific and brave poems entrust themselves to that wager. And you can too.” —Tenney Nathanson

Quantum Jitters by Patricia Carlin

“Patricia Carlin combines an adventurous sense of form with an unmistakably personal voice of sharp wit and subtle intelligence. She draws on everything from fairy tales, to the techniques of Oulipo, to transformations of the work of others such as Virginia Woolf. The poems can be playful; but there is also a disquieting beauty to these lyrics.”—Elaine Equi

“Patricia Carlin’s poems are a pulse-taking scan of experimental forms metabolically torqued to breaking point. Quantum Jitters comes with needful phrases, “negations,”mini-arguments that expand on contact, where the smallest wisp of a word turns out to be a good straw to grasp. Readers will find here a homeopathic remedy for our disaster-prone quantum universe.”—Elizabeth Macklin

Fort Dad by Stephen Paul Miller

“Our consciousness needs a new conscience: human consciousness needs a new keel. Some of its lines of design may be found in Miller’s poetry.” —Sam Truitt, American Book Review

“Conversational fluidity and unstrained syntax enable Miller to address politics, current events, theoretical concerns, and personal experience with critical acumen.” —Barbara K. Fischer, Boston Review

“The lines snake and cascade across the pages, liberated from the flush left format…We have become the muse and are inspired by our transformation.” —Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail

“Lively, brainy, probing…Miller’s erudite, humane, and yes, talky poems are punctuated by young Noah with exuberant drawings.” —Joyelle McSweeney, Constant Critic

Light Light or the Curvature of the Earth by Harriet Zinnes

“Harriet Zinnes’s most recent volume of poetry exhibits the wisdom and poise of a poet at the height of her considerable powers. Surely she is one of the best poets of her generation.” —Eric Miles Williamson

“In these new poems, Harriet Zinnes invents a further, unforgettable antiquity in language as pure and epigrammatic as that of the Greek Anthology. All things find voice and all speak fearlessly. Zinnes has truly discovered a whole new form of integrity here at the end of the world.”—Donald George Revell

“Alternately querulous and resigned, hopeful and despairing, Harriet Zinnes’s poems contemplate the ties that bind us all to our world—or don’t.”—Amanda Cockrell