2024 Marsh Hawk Press Prize Winners

The MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE
($1,000.00 Cash Prize and Publication of the Book)

Chosen by JOHN KEENE (read about him) 

Xiaoqiu Qiu 

Although it feels almost a cliché to state that a great book of poetry takes its reader on a journey, Xiaoqiu Qiu’s Other Side of Ocean, a collection of startling richness and depth, achieves that and more. Qiu’s collection maps out a series of transnational and translingual geographical and psychic voyages that touch upon the cosmic, span the global, and dive into the personal and quotidian, with an often galvanic formal inventiveness and brio. Other Side of Ocean‘s playful plethora of forms, many invented by the poet himself, show an abiding interest not only in what these poems have to say but how they say it, utilizing multiple poetic resources, including visuality, concretion and attentiveness to the page, as well as to the line and to sound, to powerful effect. One of the collection’s major successes lies in how it artfully melds genres, modes and styles within English- and Chinese-language traditions, in order to embody and enact the complexities of travel, exile, desire, loss, alienation, hope, and ultimately knowledge in its many forms. Other Side of Ocean charts the speaker’s journey across four sections, “Sails,” “Waves,” “Tides,” and “Shores,” centering water, as image and idea, metaphor and metonym, at the core of his poetics, while also devising fresh ways to depict and invoke the contours and particularities of an immigrant’s experience. Also noteworthy amidst the poems’ moments of precision are those spaces of linguistic slippage and opacity, underscoring the limits of writing and understanding in ways that only literature can. Thematically rich, formally novel, Other Side of Ocean is a work of considerable artistry and heralds Qiu as an important new voice. –John Keene

The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD
($250.00 Cash Prize)

Martheaus Perkins

The ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL AWARD
($250.00 Cash Prize)

Jay Brecker

FINALISTS

Fred Muratori, Peter Kline, N. Minnick, Vincent Rendoni, Marlaina Nugent, Marcy Rae Henry, E. M. Schorb, Eric Evans, Chris Green, Cait Weiss Orcutt, Forester McClatchey, Karina Cochran, Kathleen Spivack, Angela Ball