Winners of the 2018 Palette Poetry Prize
It is an honor and a privilege to share the winners of the 2018 Palette Poetry Prize, as selected from our finalists by Shane McCrae.
Community Feedback: Would You Have Told? by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
“That immersive discomfort, enjoyable and an end in itself, is all too rare in submissions—it’s my hope that by examining it here with Melisa, how it’s been developed and performed, we can walk away with a new understanding of how to approach difficult emotional subjects in our writing.”
Debt
“Taught us to levitate for a reasonable fee Fed us for a reasonable fee Gave us lung disease for a reasonable fee”
Palette Poetry Prize Finalists
Palette Poetry is honored to share with everyone the finalist list of poems for the Palette Poetry Prize. Shane McCrae currently has the fifteen poems and will select the winner in November. We can’t wait to share with you the winning poem!
Featured Poetry
We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.
What We Carry
By Sarah Carey
“Mailboxes open, close / like gates to territory lost, or mouths of birds // our hopeful hands still feed, the gone forever get, / the passages we carry inside.”
Poetry We Admire: Fear
That time of year has arrived where we all deliberately engage with fear—communal, familial grappling with death and nightmare. For October’s PWA, our editors sought out poems that speak to such engagement, that wrestle with violence like Leila Chatti’s “After Reading…”, or consummate the scary stories we tell ourselves like Justin Phillip Reed’s “Ruthless”, or explore the paradox thrumming between pleasure and fear like Emmalee Hagarman “Our Most Cherished Terrors”.
A hundred-mile breath
“My mouth a messy mountain, a land- / mass of round-backed sounds, a bulge / of bleeding ballads.”