2024 Winners

Judges' Comments     |     Kate Siklosi and Jordan Abel

Reading through the submissions for the contest, we were reminded of the power and beauty of experimental poetics to engage and interrogate the spaces, places, and narratives of our lives—from the natural landscape to the rhetoric of state documents—and take us outside the parameters of the page into other worlds of inquiry. At its best, experimental writing invites the author to break free of familiar forms and structures, to disrupt and challenge the reading process, and to rethink language itself. 

In particular, the first place winner, “Check the Lot,” transports us into specific spatial and bodily geographies. With shocking clarity brought about by combining striking visual poetry and narrative, the piece conveys what it is like to be a body “pinned in space” by a gendered fear of violence, visceral unsafeness, and a looming, unpredictable threat that lurks in even the most mundane of public places, from laundromats to parking lots. In its interrogation of the everydayness of risk endured by some bodies by just being bodies in space, the piece unzips the cloak of patriarchal impunity to reveal a larger argument about how the many inequities of our world are deeply and inescapably intertwined in our social and cultural fabric.

The second place winner, “Heart Rate Analysis for ME/CFS,” transported us in and out of the page—from reading to listening in a soundscape of quickening heartbeats—creating an alluring examination of the body’s response to different conditions and environments. 

In third place, “Seed Collecting” cleverly plays with “taxonomy” and categorization to speak about the “hidden” life of plants. The piece pairs a relatively simplistic and familiar visual of seed envelopes with an otherworldly poetics that stopped us in our tracks with its ethereal beauty. 

If poetry is just a container, experimental poetry challenges our perceptions of the kinds of things that can or cannot be contained by poetry. The collective works of the winners ask us to reimagine our relationship with that container and to follow where the writing leads.