Winner of the 2024 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

OTHER SIDE OF OCEAN

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… Thematically rich, formally novel, Other Side of Ocean is a work of considerable artistry and heralds Qiu as an important new voice.”

— John Keene, Contest Judge

THE INSTALLATION OF FEAR

Jon Curley

“At the brink/Or maybe the threshold,” Jon Curley’s The Installation of Fear imagines poesis – the act of making – as an “ever-incomplete” topography of hope and regenerative possibilities in a dark time. Neither the discredited gentrified and brutalist environment of Master Builder Robert Moses, nor the fear-filled topos of the alienated mind, Curley’s audiological installation represents a third space, one that is antithetical to “arranged formats,” and thus flexible enough, playful enough, open-hearted enough, and interpersonal enough, to construct a vision of reckoning that incorporates wreckage and renewal. Inspired by Blake’s “The Ancient of Days” (1794), in which Urizen measures the space beneath him with a compass, Curley’s ludic feast of phonemic puns and witty etymological doubles breaks the “mindforged manacles” of “the Great Limiter” who “eyes us as we try to gather any available graces/for us to go on.”

— Daniel Morris

ESCAPE FROM THE FAT FARM: Poetry and Prose

Sandy McIntosh

“In Escape from the Fat Farm, McIntosh has an uncanny feel for when to leave off—his propensity for the well timed, reticent moment suggests something essential that’s especially salient in his portraits. His work is transformative while it’s as much, or more, imagined as transcriptive. Something of great value has to do with language and, by extension, how a nascent writer emerges over time, whose literary propensity renders the past as necessity… McIntosh’s waggish, fracturous moments sketch primal scenes in which one or another ‘harmless impersonator’ steps forth from a menagerie of unreliable narrators. The ethereal memories of Sandy McIntosh recover his younger years in which, too often, he’s learned to finesse the implacable forces trying to keep him in a box. In his early adulthood he’ll come to learn how peculiar people, some like him escapees, can be. His memories are subtly painful, raucously hilarious.” 

– Burt Kimmelman, from the Introduction

IN THIS BURNING WORLD: Poems of Love and Apocalypse

Mary Mackey

“In This Burning World is a visionary epic that turns devastatingly intimate. William Blake is here as is Hiroshima, but the prophetic arc is Mary Mackey’s alone. How do we negotiate an apocalypse when the enemy is the self, when we have known for centuries where our path leads? There can perhaps be no answer, but Mackey inhabits these questions with a fierce exemplary responsibility. Her poems are invested with the sacred energy of the natural world whose destruction she can’t endure. Her book is incandescent. You won’t forget it.”

 – D. Nurkse