Judge Michal 'MJ' Jones comments on 2024's winning entries
To fall—or stay—in love with the world even as it ends again seems an impossibility, yet the poets in this year's contest make me want to linger even in what aches. I remain in awe of what poets are able to do with such limited space on the page and in our attentions. In these poems, entire lives are lived and taken; ecological and social crises are catalogued; and the dead are honored so vividly they sit and speak among us.
In each of these poetic feats, an interconnected message: Feel. Be felt. Live life resounding and brazen.
The Winners
"Shoulder Season" by D.T. Christensen
Tom Howard Prize for verse in any style
The poet of "Shoulder Season" accomplishes that which is so difficult to do but is defining of poetry—they convey so much in the margins of such little space. This is a poem of living, breathing, dying, decomposing,
and remembering—all with the foreground of seasons we have no control over in this life. In fragrance, sensation, and hue, the poem asks us to live on purpose, without rush, no matter how an inevitable end of season rushes toward us.
"Ars Poetica" by Serrina Zou
Margaret Reid Prize for verse that rhymes or has a traditional style
In this ars poetica, the poet seems to be shouting from the "silk-spun cocoon of caterpillars" that the art of writing poetry is about discovery and surprise more than it is about directing. The
poet's delicate and nature-rich imagery makes me want to fall into that discovery again and again.
Honorable Mentions: Tom Howard Prize
"A Catalogue of Hurricanes" by Jay Aja
In "A Catalogue of Hurricanes", the poet breathes into each catastrophic memory reduced to news clipping with sharp recollection. Recollection of the disasters which so disproportionately impact the loves of the already most marginalized among us.
"My Mother Used Her Kohl's Cash to Buy Her Husband's Urn" by Ceren Ege
"Sometimes when I want to feel alive I remember the dead." What a breathtaking elegy. With reverent observance, the author captures the very essence of memory in this poem—its wholeness and its
unbecoming, its sweetness and its tender pain. The life and death breathing in the same room, "nights the same as the mornings."
"The Eyes Go" by Keith Hagen
The aching vulnerability in this poem is one that is harder to come by these days. Admirable is the poet's ability to state plain that "There is [...] fear that won't leave," to admit longing, to ache openly in a world that increasingly demands the falsehood of hardness.
"I'm Done with Birds" by Lance Larsen
"I'm Done With Birds" captures perfectly the messiness of daily grief—its presence everywhere, its reincarnations, its bitterness, its taking up residence in our homes and hearts. Poignant, gut-wrenching, and amusing at times, its song is resounding.
"Daily Life in Gaza" by Carla Schick
This poem triumphs most not only in what it does do, but mostly in what it does not—there is no skirting around naming the crimes of genocide, of depicting the violence for anything other than the horror that it is. The poet understands that language matters, that
image can haunt us into action, can start revolutions.
"Elegy for Uncle Ron" by Jennifer Tubbs
"Loving right down to the rind," past the plump and bitter flesh, is this poet's reminder to us in this tender and critical elegy. They remind us that we are each complicated beings, that it is "what God does" to love and cherish us each in our shortcomings.
Honorable Mentions: Margaret Reid Prize
"Trifecta of Sonnets, New Year's Day" by Shelly Cato
Time comes to a standstill in this image-rich scene. In three sonnets, we contemplate time and injury, and the poems sing at every opportunity in a true poetic feat of form.
"Entering the Mine" by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda
Even without the accompanying painting to guide it, this poem expresses in image, tone, and hue the struggles of working-class life through the eyes of generations of miners. This poet paints a story that spans a lifetime and breathes outside of the
painting, an immediacy that is both haunting and sensory.
"Sonnet in Triptych" by Em McCoy
With a balance of measured calculation and express vulnerability, the speaker in "Sonnet In Triptych" makes lyrical and mythical the vessel of family—in not one, but three sonnets, no less!
"Sestina (A Ghost Story)" by Elinor Ann Walker
There are many lives and many stories woven into this poem—the often attempted but rarely successful sestina. So dreamy and rich is the poet's storytelling that by the poem's end, the form itself has been transcended, and all that I can see is the lake,
teeming with life and loss.
We received 2,481 submissions from around the world. We would like to recognize these finalists for their outstanding efforts: Carlos Andrés Gómez and Maurya Kerr.
See our press release about the winners
Learn more about the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest
