Award Winners
George Bogin Memorial Award - 2023
Tom Thompson
Finalist
Katie Farris
Standing in Line at the Protest
You want to get good at saying no.
When the light goes, your device glows
from within, like a pomegranate.
Each ping a seed mapping out the zone.
They come with badges and black tape
to lead you into the narrow lane.
Mushrooms fruit in the sponginess at your feet.
They shine like the moon over Chicago.
It’s a bird, you think, or a tourist or the weather
overhead taking shots.
No, it’s the small silver king of the gone world.
Call it president grease.
The asphalt’s slick with it.
It’s the time before nothing and nowhere
and no one ever did.
Atsuro Riley on Tom Thompson
These poems from Tom Thompson had me at first harrow.
This tight little four-poem sequence puts my reader's pulse —and poetry itself— through its paces, haunting and heightening in equal measure: encompassing our distresses while enlarging us while at the same time running us a bit ragged.
From "The Rat in the Tree" to "The Panic Cotillion," Thompson's poems see our 'all-American catastrophe' with an admirably cold eye. And yet: though in our current 'fray' we might be 'falling apart alone,' 'hair on end and hungry,' now we have Thompson's precise-nervy music to sound it all out, to (somehow) level us out.
Mandelstam in his own dark patch of history was sure of poetry's will to translate 'the noise of time' into a kind of music. And Heaney from his own complex crossroad held fast to his faith that the real poetry could allow us 'to repose in the stability conferred by a musically-satisfying order of sounds.' While Thompson's poems are mindful of our (decidedly not-stable) moment, they are also hungry: daringly hankering for a music that might transmute-transcend the moment. Unconsoled and unsettling as they are, these poems glow with an active faith. And confirm me in mine.
**
Tom Thompson is the author of Passenger, as well as The Pitch and Live Feed. He lives in New York City.
Finalist
Katie Farris’s most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), was recommended by The New York Times and listed as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. Ferris is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, and the cotranslator of many works, including The Country Where Everyone’s Name is Fear, translations of Ukrainian poets Ludmila and Boris Khersonsky, which was one of World Literature Today’s Notable Books of 2022. She’s a Pushcart Prize winner.