At Common Ground Review, we seek to publish well crafted poems, short stories and creative nonfiction that surprise and illuminate, amuse, inform, and/or challenge--not always all at once. CGR comes out twice a year (except recently, while we've adjusted to the on-line format) and accepts submissions from September to May: we hold our poetry contest once a year, opening up for entries in January and this year closing it in mid-April .
We are delighted to announce our 2023 Poetry Contest Winners! Oliver de la Paz has chosen the following:
For Honorable Mention "Overhearing your native tongue in a foreign land" by Joseph Scalice
For Third Place "In Case I Ever End Up on a True Crime Podcast" by Kelli Lage
I enjoyed the gallows humor of this piece, but also the sharp lyrical twists of it with lines like “Songs I played in the background pierced tongues” and the opening line, “Sun did not earmark me its stunt double…” Everyone is a suspect and the speaker, at the center of the drama, suspects everyone and invites the reader to share in secrets and conspiracies. A fun and lyrical poem.
For Second Place "You're from Nowhere" by Abby E. Murray
The If/Then construction of the poem serves as the fulcrum for its lyric beauty, and I love how the speaker takes us through backroads and zip codes here and there across the landscape. Ultimately, the poem’s shift towards definition also creates a source of tension as the wisdom of and acknowledgment of a place also invites the sharpest scrutiny.
And finally, for First Place "Tree Streets" by Josh Jacobs
The poem evokes an idyllic and pastoral time, when tall trees shaded the neighborhood streets and the sounds of children rebound from beneath the canopy. But the poem then folds in on itself and asks what is that memory? With tenderness, the poem examines what had once been expected, examining aspects of gender and knowledge, determining what is undetermined, and reexamining what had once been doctrine. With tenderness, the poem urges us to know that deep in the roots twining below our feet, what is vital is how we hold one another aloft.
These poems will be published in our next issue, forthcoming in late June.
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts, for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. With Stacey Lynn Brown, he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.
A founding member, Oliver serves as the cochair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Our 2022 Judge, Abby E. Murray, is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She was the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and after relocating to Washington DC for two years, she is now in the process of returning to Washington State.
The poet’s handling of this simple but stark imagery shows restraint in a way that lets one lingering encounter with death absorb all the light our eyes can give to it by reading. How does a poem manage to feel so ghostly while rooted in the experience of living? In my notes, I wrote, I love this.
Abby Murray says of this poem,
This is a beautiful, dancing glimpse at a single word’s role in the poet’s heart. The way words are used—and by whom—matters. Every word has infinite histories, knowings, possibilities, births, and deaths within it, and it does us good to explore those experiences. This poet accomplishes that exploration while creating a poem that, in the end, instructs us on how to appreciate a word.
Abby Murray says of this poem,
A poem that is true to its title: one moment, equal parts prayer and blessing, shared between writer and reader. Exquisite in its simplicity and truthfulness.
