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!
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.”
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”.
“My mouth a messy mountain, a land- / mass of round-backed sounds, a bulge / of bleeding ballads.”
By JK Anowe
to memory / memory being the sound she made when i moved / through her / like nectar through
a wrist-cut / & she was throbless as / a cursed womb
I had some dark moments in my late twenties when I didn’t think I would ever break through. It felt to me as if there were some invisible club that was trying to keep me out it. I was furious and determined. I tried to put my rage to work in the service of my art.
We’ve got to be thankful to live in a world which offers so many opportunities for poets to get their work out there. Here are five presses and awards to submit your chapbooks to this month.
“The pizza burns. Your poem gets published / in the New Yorker. No one reads it. / Everyone reads it. You eat the pizza.”
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