2017 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize
Winners and Finalists

Contest Winner:
Geoffrey O’Brien

Robert Creeley Award:
Vernita Hall

Rochelle Ratner Award:
Joan Baranow

Finalists:
Robert Cooperman, Orlando Ricardo Menes, Aaron Brown, Carrie Green, Diane Martin, Reeves Keyworth, Jennifer Soule, Tricia  McCallum, Cathleen Calbert, Liz Robbins, Ellie White, Anne Champion, Mary Pinard, Susan  Lewis, Gail Hanlon, Jose Flores, Jeffrey Schneider, Stephen Priest, Charles Springer, Judith Nutter

Winner of the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Prize

ROBERT GIBB: AFTER

"AFTER is an artfully made, intelligent and aching embodiment of a question that can’t be answered: is the lovely persistence of the world a source of consolation or of deeper grief?” —Mark Doty

PATRICIA CARLIN: Second Nature

“Visionary, honed, distilled, charged with the immediacy of a dream before you coax it into a story and the challenges of our baffling history, Carlin’s poems remind me— entirely on their own terms— of the intimate ‘you must change your life’ urgency of the Duino
Elegies.” —D. Nurkse

BASIL KING: History Now

“‘Perspective’ is what King brings to his vivid, hybrid writing. It is the perspective
of someone who has been trained not just to look but to SEE… King’s work always
yields what his old now departed friend Amiri Baraka called‘emotional validity.’”
—Ammiel Alcalay

BURT KIMMELMAN:
Abandoned Angel

"By way of a precise and pared-down language these poems artfully render a physical world while simultaneously serving as objects to be engaged for the contemplation of such a world. The poet not only situates us in the spaces of particular 'Weather' but also opens us to the poignancy of the passage of time against the vibrations of various 'Cities.' And in the latter case what might at first seem to be simple narrative progressions can often startlingly make manifest deeply heartfelt human illuminations. Kimmelman is obviously a master of his chosen strategies in both cases."—Hugh Seidman

EDWARD FOSTER:
Sowing the Wind

“As a writer, critic, editor, and teacher, Ed Foster is inveterately Apollonian: lucid, balanced, well organized.” --American Book Review

“Edward Foster’s poetry, always exacting and infinitely sweeping, comes to us like a whisper from behind our own ears. . . . His poems suspend themselves just above language, connotative of some understanding—perhaps common to all of us—that recedes at the brink of words. It is just on this cusp, with some doubt, some explaining, that we find Foster, and trust him to guide us on an impossible course. With pristine lucidity, he knows, the ‘propositions weren’t enough.’”
–Brooklyn Rail

SANDY McINTOSH: A Hole In the Ocean: A Hamptons' Apprenticeship

"These irresistibly amusing and engaging recollections of the author's encounters with the great and near-great artists and poets who washed ashore in the Hamptons has a special charm, as our intrepid protagonist plays unofficial chauffeur, therapist, straight-man and witness, always with retrospective self-awareness, insight and bittersweet gratitude."—Phillip Lopate

Winner of the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Prize

TANA JEAN WELCH: Latest Volcano

“The presentation of characters, settings, and situations is as subtly beautiful as it is haunting, and leaves the reader inspired and in awe. These poems are gilt-lined, catching to the eye and the mind, and reminiscent of the broader circumstances found within everyday humanity.—Greg Bem, Rain

CLAUDIA CARLSON: My Chocolate Sarcophagus

The twenty-three poems in Claudia Carlson’s Chocolate Sarcophagus combine raw courage and absolute beauty. Powerful, poignant, ecstatically lyrical, and beautifully crafted, they present us with an unflinching contemplation of mortality that never descends into sentimentality. In these poems, Carlson brings us an important message from the edge of life. —Mary Mackey

PAUL PINES: Charlotte Songs

The great themes—like Love, Death and Family— have inspired masterpieces and, alas, Hallmark Cards. In Charlotte Songs, Paul Pines celebrates his daughter. But, if you want the Hallmark Card version of fatherhood, you’ve come to the wrong place. Pines gives us the full paradox of living with his child as she grows from toddler to young woman. Inventive, humorous, baffling and poignant. —Dalt Wonk