Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Winner 2023:
Las Palmas by Keith Jones
Las Palmas is a manuscript of immersion. Here, the poet weaves an intergenerational narrative of place & play that brings voice—no, chorus—to landscapes gathered in our midst. These poems speak in tongues both necessary & innovative; where language sparks a new world irresistibly familiar. —Brody Parrish Craig, judge’s citation
Coming out in Spring of 2026.
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Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Winner 2022:
Defensible Space/if a crow– by Ian U Lockaby
Entering this manuscript was like entering a spell. The work immediately opened to a landscape where “a black ice cube pressed / against the grain of the sun” mirrors the crow which hangs like a specter in the atmosphere of this book. The measured line sometimes pitches into lyric scattered across the page and at other times aggregates, pulls itself in tightly as the speaker explains that “Inside of this life … / is another life/ I cannot claim.” This poet’s embrace of a stuttering utterance is masterful as the interstitial pause dominates a page so that we are caught up in the trepidation of a beingness that “bursts into a thousand fledglings / … “ The book’s refrain takes us, through the conditional made image — If, a crow— from the tucked in-voice of a naturally lugubrious landscape to a joy that is ordered, numbered, and measured, that is, joy that is joy precisely because of the limitations of joy. I feel blessed to have met this book but more, to have experienced a poetics brave enough to embrace the unbearable as transformative. —Ruth Ellen Kocher, judge’s citation
Coming out in Fall of 2024.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo237307949.html
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Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Winner 2021:
extraordinary tides by Pattie McCarthy
“I was first drawn to Pattie McCarthy’s extraordinary tides by the beauty and strangeness of its language. Strange compound words (some neologisms, some not) such as “wrackline,” “boyfull,” “holdfast,” “distelfink,” ‘bladderwrack,” and “seastruck” seem temporarily agglomerated like the kelp and shells mixed in the latest high tide’s wrackline. This book is a study of flux in the shape of sea and sky. It does as Lorine Niedecker recommended: It throws “objects to the flood.” Not carelessly or nonchalantly. An object, an amalgam, is, “what makes a pause—even/the smallest stop in the relentless//present tense.” There is a “we” in these poems that tries to puzzle out shapes and distinctions—“holdfasts.” We keep track of the neap tides as well as of lent and yule in the Advent calendar. “We can tell a hawk from a heronshow.” But still things slide—even the most important things:
the ocean took
the form of my daughter
& held her up
& held her up
the ocean took the form of
my daughter— a cormorant
It is the tension between tenuous solidity and flood that makes this work so beautiful and moving.” —Rae Armantrout, judge’s citation
Published in Fall of 2023.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/E/bo196817946.html
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Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Winner 2020:
Both, Apollo by Mary Wilson
“And either my logic is valid and this world is a duplex,” writes Mary Wilson in her chapbook, Both, Apollo. In Wilson’s world, the illogical is the logical and the result is a book of possibilities. In Both, Apollo, the “butterflies are pornographic” and a “green dress” is compared to a “great gymnast.” What fun to read these poems line by line and not know what to expect next. Like the speaker, “I find myself in this/gray town where all is possible drawn to/its uncoupled logic.” Here is a new voice of surprise and I look forward to all of Wilson’s future possibilities. —Victoria Chang, judge’s citation
Published in Spring of 2022.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo166642415.html
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Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Winner 2019:
Boyish by Brody Parrish Craig
“The poetry of Boyish exists in that sweet spot between subconscious and cosmos, where the mind can catch any inch of oppression and turn it into music. A genius, Craig, operates a ghost rail line; gut-wrenching rendition of ‘Stormy Monday’ driven in next to the steel. A book built with lightning, whispered in the soup-line, reading your fortune through scattered tossed bones and bayonet fragments. Watch the best friend you could not protect from a merciless onslaught of violent American hegemony, save their self and become one of the greats; proving that poetry is the cradle that society never mentions.
—Tongo Eisen-Martin, judge’s citation
Published in Spring of 2021.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo91670363.html
