Poetry We Admire: Rising Poets
By Sara Dudo
In this Poetry We Admire column, we revisit some of our previous Rising Poet Prize winners to see what new poems they have published to highlight their writing journey and encourage our emerging writers to continue sharing their work with the world.
__________spinach grows well
alongside lettuce, mouth with scream,
lust with patience. it has to dowith photosynthesis, or osmosis—
consent given unlike death which stinks up
the long corridors of the heart
and just takes____and takes
from “WHEN A BLACK WOMAN DIES”
Akhim Yuseff Cabey was the winner of the 2024 Rising Poet Prize for his poem, “Olentangy River, 2019,” and his debut collection Get Funky, Get Swoll is set for publication with Black Lawrence Press on April 21, 2026. In “WHEN A BLACK WOMAN DIES,” published by The Los Angeles Review, Akhim explores permission and loss through the lens of death and offers the comparisons of gardens and physical intimacy: a must-read to learn of those “long corridors of the heart.”
_______________________The sky at sunset seen from the building
____windows would have been a
waning yellow, like our flag, like the sclera of our eyes. Suffering a
____mysterious illness, a local
healer may suspect that an animal was conjured inside the body of the
____afflicted. Upon cure, a
snake might slither out of the mouth of the patient; a family of spiders
____might crawl out of their
throat. When one says to another, I curse you, they are saying, literally, I
____put something inside of
you that doesn’t belong there. How else to heal, then, than by leaving?
from “Venom / If a Stanza Is a Room”
by Logan Klutse
Logan Klutse was awarded the first place prize in the 2023 Rising Poet Prize for his poem “Sidewalk.” In “Venom / If a Stanza Is a Room,” published by Poetry Daily, Logan traverses his experience identifying the recurring reflex of apology within differing spaces based on identity, and offers an examination of rooms and spaces and the rights one has to be within them.
_________________But here I am,
alive and something next to human or
woman on a cliff’s upper lip, wailingthe mind’s small fists against the shell
of the world. I press gnawed fingertipsagainst the holes of the bees’ nests but not
inside. Lord, lord, let me sink into the groundand curl up against soft yellow bodies buzzing
in the darkness.
from “Adjusted in the Tomb”
Marisa Lainson was the second runner-up of the 2024 Rising Poet Prize for her poem “This Little Piggy Went to the Market.” In “Adjusted in the Tomb,” published by Harbor Review, Marisa explores the pangs of being human, of treating oneself with kindness, and of longing for peace and rest during troubling times in a beautifully intimate, vulnerable, and confessional style.
_________[this spiral staircase]
_________[this ascent]walking down
the longue duréeas archers’ slits
bleed strips of light_________[a bus glints]
_________[a taxi rattles]between the third and ninth
_________dreams I feltcenturies, an approach,
became perhaps susceptible
from “Aurelian Wall I & II”
by Mia Kang
Mia Kang was the third place winner of the 2023 Rising Poet Prize for her poem “Tony Reflects on Form.” Mia is the author of City Poems and All Empires Must. This excerpt, along with all the poems from All Empires Must, interrogates conceptions of power through architecture and art. Playing on the epigraph offered in the first of the two poems, a quote by Hendrik W. Dey from The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome, the poem is precise in diction and word choice, and excellently manipulates and reworks descriptions on the Aurelian Wall.