Award Winners
George Bogin Memorial Award - 2019
Sara Henning
ONCE, I PRAYED IN THE WATER
Blessed be the good-time girl thighs-deep in a striped inner tube
cattail fronds & cigarette butts lush against her toes blessed be
the empress of chic I was sixteen shellacked in Coppertone tangled
in a pick-up game of football her hands muscular birds
gripping deep through blitz & tackle all the jacked-up Fords
like piss drunk cicadas pulsing hymns through rolled-down windows
Stevie Ray and the Boss shredding through steam as I spread
my hips my legs & lunged I was the girl kissing boys in sit-top
kayaks another flea-chawed dog sun-blissed & brined as if
someone told her to breach is to breathe pretty baby it's time to blow
this mortal coil every minute of her life so I rode the twist & flush
of summer until even the stars couldn't look at me before I
was a woman sand-hardened late thirties I slipped like a fish
into spume I quaked all night in the weeds I fed on every shine
that would touch me so Lord, will you make a temple of the water
will you brandish your body in lake-skin for me I've had
enough of this lemon-swoon sfumato this musk-blaze of summer
genuflecting like a fool I've already buried the shame-slick
pretty young thing I was I smoked that queen when I kissed my mother
blown open by cancer watched strange men hoist her body
into an oven set to the temperature all things beautiful & terrible
begin to burn
Khaled Mattawa on Sara Henning
Among a very strong pool of poems submitted, I have chosen the work of poet Sara Henning as the winner of this year's George Bogin Memorial Award. An elegiac spirit gifts these poems their power as well as the various turns of passionate declamation, restraint, and the thoughtful search for solace. The poet revisits memories, probes traumatic moments with enviable objectivity offering tender forgiveness or issuing firm judgments on the self as the case may be. And while the locus of these lyrics is that of personal experience, the poems offer a powerful indictment of the culture of violence against, and degradation of, women surrounding the speaker. The poems deliver these psychological, social and political insights with a great deal of esthetic pleasure. The narrative pacing is quite remarkable as the speaker sets up the dramatic tension then deftly explores the surroundings with equal amounts of revelation and suspense. We are quickly and powerfully drawn into the world of these poems and into the experiences of the speaker, and the by the end of our reading we find that traces of these experiences have lodged themselves within us, changing us. None of this powerful effect could have been achieved without the poet's choice and manipulation of language, which is always intuitive and surprising, creating word by word a group of poems that moves and enlightens.