The editors of FIELD are pleased to announce
the twelfth annual FIELD Poetry Prize competition.
The contest is open to all poets, whether or
not they have previously published in book form.
Unpublished poetry manuscripts between 50 and
80 pages in length will be considered. Oberlin
College Press publishes the winning manuscript
in the FIELD Poetry Series and awards the winning
author one thousand dollars ($1000).
Manuscripts must
be postmarked during May 2008. The contest reading fee is $22 and includes
a one-year subscription to FIELD:
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Please make checks payable
to Oberlin College Press.
Manuscripts will
not be returned. Include a
self-addressed, stamped postcard if you wish
to be notified that
your manuscript has been received at our office.
The winner will be announced on our website
by late August 2008.
All entries will
be read by the contest judges, David Young and David Walker, editors of FIELD.
Former students and close friends of the judges
are not eligible to compete.
Send manuscript and reading fee to:
FIELD Poetry Prize
Oberlin College Press
50 N. Professor Street
Oberlin, OH 44074
Please note: Persons interested in submitting
work for the FIELD Translation Series should
read the guidelines.
Previous Winners
(Click
on covers for further information)
J. W. Marshall MEANING A CLOUD
Winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize
"Watchful, ruefully comic,
alight with playful lyric precision and a plainspoken
rhetorical elegance, Meaning a Cloud is
not only a record of one body's recovery from
injury but a rendering of the mind's companion
journey: pained, stubbornly amused, at last
arriving at a state of
visionary completion."
--Susan Hutton
Mary Cornish RED STUDIO
Winner of the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize
"As the painters once used
the broken yolks of eggs, the rocks, and the
earth itself to make their colors, so Mary
Cornish has made these miraculous poems: so
intelligently wrought the page disappears,
so gorgeous I stand and stare. At the core
of each is human life, fiercely known and loved
and endured. These are the poems of a radiantly
alive adult woman."
--Marie Howe
Jean Gallagher STUBBORN
Winner of the 2005 FIELD Poetry Prize
"Jean Gallagher majestically
conducts a history of approaches to the sacred
in Christian art, scripture, mysticism, theology.
She rewrites the Bible as she re-sees the
'gravities, necessities, haphazard plots'
behind the frozen sacramental moments of
religious art. In a sequence here based on
a Duccio altarpiece a bewildered apostle
experiences the resurrected
Christ 'like a language / I don't know ...
and there's never been an alphabet for it,
ever.' Now--because of Jean Gallagher's splendid
experiment--there is."
--Bruce Beasley
Beckian Fritz Goldberg LIE AWAKE LAKE
Winner of the 2004 FIELD Poetry Prize
"Lie Awake Lake is
made out of a brilliance of thought, of heart,
and of language that we find only in the
truest poetry. This fierce homage to the
body and to the spirit reminds me of Ettie
Hillesum's letters from the transit camp
at Westerbork in the Netherlands in 1942-43;
it is as relentless and unmediated as if
it was letters or diaries, but it is song--come
to give us human animals pleasure and to
help us endure." --Jean Valentine
Jonah Winter AMNESIA
Winner of the 2003 FIELD Poetry Prize
"Jonah Winter resides
in the Hotel Amnesia, the Hotel of Stars--and
though he's a comedian, his room is one along
the corridor of the wistful, urbane dreamers:
Joseph Cornell, Jean Cocteau. Anais Nin,
Charles Simic. At the heart of his method
is the list, almost verbless: his marvelous
catalogues place unlikely things side by
side, creating within the frame of the poem
the tantalizing windows of the city of dream." --Mark
Doty
Carol Moldaw
THE LIGHTNING FIELD
Winner of the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize
In her third collection,
Carol Moldaw explores new territory in poems
that are thematically far-reaching and technically
superb. The book includes three long sequences
based on art and artifact in various stages
of completeness: preliminary pen-and-ink
studies, Turkish ruins, and, at the center,
the site-specific art installation that gives
the book its title and impetus. Attracting
charged material as a lightning field attracts
lightning, the poems reference narrative
but move beneath and beyond it through a
restless and rewarding insistence on making
and remaking, on seeing by degrees and seeing
whole.
Angie Estes VOICE-OVER
Winner of the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize
"Angie Estes' stunning
new collection of poems is a brilliant and
intellectually
dazzling investigation of the often unstable
relationship between language and experience.
These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate
the oscillations of event and memory in order
to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed
interweaving--in our lives--of action, meditation,
and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off
every page of this rich, compelling, and essential
new book of poetry." --David St. John
Ralph Burns
GHOST NOTES
Winner of the 2000 FIELD Poetry Prize
In his deeply innovative and
beautifully human Ghost Notes, Ralph Burns
explores the vivid relation between American
jazz and American poetry. His book embodies
the movement of jazz. In the long title poem
he plays wide open, without a mute, as Red
Allen advises. The result is inclusive and
exhilarating, a structure that keeps on opening
and opening.
Timothy Kelly STRONGER
Winner of the 1999 FIELD Poetry Prize
Timothy Kelly grew up in Cleveland and contemplated
careers in medicine and rock music before settling
on his double vocation as poet and physical
therapist, based in Olympia, Washington. He
writes about his work, his family, his memories
of growing up, and the natural area in which
he lives and often hikes. The human body, in
all its manifestations and meanings, forms
the natural center of his poetic vision.
Marcia Southwick
A SATURDAY NIGHT
AT THE FLYING DOG & OTHER POEMS
Winner of the 1998 FIELD Poetry Prize
High-spirited and unpredictable,
Marcia Southwick's third collection is, among
other things, a remarkable mirror of our place
and time. With unrelenting curiosity and brio,
she reflects our materialistic, shopping-obsessed,
informationally-exploding, and deeply confused
culture right back at us, showing us the world
we live in with unflinching honesty and compassionate
affection.
Jon Loomis VANITAS MOTEL
Winner of the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize
Things happen in Vanitas
Motel:
a funeral, a fistfight, an outburst at a poetry
reading. Its poems are surreal parables, at
once funny and dark, sensual and deeply serious.
Their revealed subjects are loss, art, illness,
and desire.
The best of new American
poetry, in handsomely designed editions
Poetry from around the
globe in extraordinary translations by some
of our finest poets
Inventive anthologies
for discriminating readers. Great for textbook
adoption too.
