Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention – serie

Turning an unflinching spotlight on the American Dream, Indigo Moor plunges headfirst into national-and personal-laments and desires. From Emmett Till to the fall of the Twin Towers and through the wildfires of Paradise, California, Moor weaves a thread through the hopes, sacrifices, and Sisyphean yearnings that make this country the beautiful trap that it is. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something takes an imagistic leap through the darker side of our search for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, perusing what we lose, what we leave behind, and what strange beauty we uncover.

First Place in Creative Works from the American Journal of Nursing's Book of the Year AwardsSecond Place in Professional Issues from the American Journal of Nursing's Book of the Year AwardsThe poems in An Otherwise Healthy Woman delve into the complexity of modern health care, illness, and healing, offering an alternative narrative to heroics and miracles. Drawing on Amy Haddad’s firsthand experiences as a nurse and patient, the poems in this collection teach us to take a moment to stop and acknowledge the longing for compassion in each of us, what ought to be the immediate human response to suffering. The poet isn’t afraid to explore her own fears and failures or to find joy and humor in the many roles women play. An Otherwise Healthy Woman presents the intimate experiences of a nurse, the vulnerable perspective of a patient, and the lessons of caring for family.

Longlisted for 2023 Julie Suk AwardThe poems of Two Open Doors in a Field are constructed through deliberate limitations, restlessly exploring place, desire, and spirituality. A profusion of sonnets rises from a single circumstance: Sophie Klahr’s experience of driving thousands of miles alone while listening to the radio, where unexpected landscapes make listening to the unexpected more acute. Accompanied by the radio, Klahr’s experience of land is transformed by listening, and conversely, the body of the radio is sometimes lost to the body of the land. The love story at the core of this work, Klahr’s bond with Nebraska, becomes the engine of this travelogue. However far the poems range beyond Nebraska, they are tethered to an environment of work and creation, a place of dirt beneath the nails where one can see every star and feel, acutely, the complexity of connection.

Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable MentionThe title poem of this collection refers to the phantom island of Antillia, included on maps in the fifteenth century but later found not to exist. The ghosts that haunt this collection are phantom islands, moon lakes, lasers used to clean the caryatids at the Acropolis, earlier versions of the self, suicides, a madam from the Old West, petroleum, snapdragons, pets, ice apples, Casper, and a “resident ghost” who makes the domestic realm of “the cradle and the bed” uninhabitable. The ghosts are sons, fathers “asleep in front of the TV,” and a variety of exes-“lost boys” with names like The Texan and Mr. No More Cowboy Hat whom Henrietta Goodman treats with snarky wit but also with grief, guilt, and love.Although memories pervade this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: “not dying, but molting.”

The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable MentionIn Nine Persimmons Kerry James Evans traces a geography both intimate and far-flung—Tuscaloosa and Biloxi, Charleston and New Orleans, the Cloisters above Washington Heights, a banana orchard in the Azores, a journey to Rome. The poems move with the gravity of pilgrimage, their compass set between wandering and witness, as they cross from ballfields and shipyards into the charged realms of myth and ritual. Evans's gift lies in how the ordinary gathers its own divinity: persimmon seeds split to forecast winter, a grandmother's weed-eater gospel, Camaro burnouts paired with tarot, psalms rising as pelicans wheel into sudden sky. In this light Nine Persimmons reveals how the most unassuming corners of existence sometimes hold the deepest truths.