We’re pleased to nominate the following poems, from our 2018 line of chapbooks, for the Pushcart Prize & anthology. Congratulations to all the nominees!
“Filthy Woman Writes a Letter”
by Noor Hindi
from Diary of a Filthy Woman
“Omen”
by Maggie Woodward
from FOUND FOOTAGE
“Disarticulated” & “Extinct”
by Sara Ryan
from Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned
“How Darkness Enters a Body”
by Sarah Nichols
from How Darkness Enters a Body
“I Tell What Kind of Girl”
by Sally Rosen Kindred
from Says the Forest to the Girl
by Noor Hindi
DIARY OF A FILTHY WOMAN is shot through with desire, standing firm in its ground as protest, as prayer, as command. Hindi masterfully weaves vulnerability and strength, pain with sharp determination—she is tempered steel, she is flame, she is fierce in her direction: “Make a bonfire out of want. // Jump into it.” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
16 pages
inkjet cover
open edition
by Sara Ryan
Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press, 2018) is an investigation of the history and practice of taxidermy via hybrid text of poetry and micro-essay endnotes. In blood, bone, feather, Ryan weaves a spell to enchant the taxidermy enthusiast, museum explorer, poet—the curious. These pieces are a combination of tender & strange, delightful in their approach to the combination of grotesque & beautiful & trophy-keeping that makes up taxidermy—this practice of preservation. Ryan’s hybrid form is a deepening of the subject, the stitching of memory & curiosity & invention.
40 pages
inkjet cover
open edition
by Maggie Woodward
Found Footage is visceral little book of freckled skin, fox-bellies, and sparrow blood. There are erasures scribbled out in pen and secrets released into the night—girl stories, horror stories, love stories, a little bit of each one ominous.: “this is how the story goes: there was a girl & / there was a river.” They feel like confessions pulled from a diary stained around the edges in blood and darker things, each one “fanged (but lovely).” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
44 pages
letterpress covers
numbered editions of 50
by Sarah Nichols
“In this darkness, desire is safe,” begins the title poem for Sarah Nichols’ How Darkness Enters a Body. In this darkness, desire is safe. There are secrets here, confessions. The poet brings us to the photos of Diane Arbus, inspecting contact sheets and images, mining poems from silver embedded in emulsion. Black and white photographs transformed into ekphrastic lines, light and shadow, poet leading reader to artist to begin a conversation. The speaker’s voice is sure, whispering to us in the way Arbus’ images do, pools of darkness unexpected and edged, like shadows thrown under an eclipse. Confront her or take her hand—these and more choices are yours: “Here is your tongue, sister. / Let me share it.” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
16 pages
inkjet cover
open edition
by Sally Rosen Kindred
Kindred offers an invitation to join the wolf & the girl in the forest, to walk in this fairy tale land of Rapunzel, Little Red, and Sleeping Beauty. Here, the forest speaks. “Drink the world / you won’t admit you want—” it says, “This / is the story; to wake // you must claim it, crow-close in the telling. Climb / in.” She empowers these women, crow-touched and sharp as a tempered blade, realizing a “story where / the hard-skinned woman / carries thunder and bread / through the wood.” This is a chapbook of poems full of dandelion, ash, and bone—she asks each woman or girl to make a choice, to realize a choice is possible: “What is it that waits / inside her, a nest / or a knife, a huntsman / or an open door?” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
40 pages
inkjet cover
open edition