2019 Broadside Award and Glass Prize
Congratulations to the 2019 SRP GLASS BROADSIDE CONTEST winners, Jendi Reuter and Armenian Davoudian.
Jendi Reiter of Northampton, MA, won our Franklin and Hampshire county competition, and Armen Davoudian of Palo Alto, CA, won the nationwide contest. Both winners receive the $250 Glass Prize, and Slate Roof Press will publish their poem in a limited-edition letterpress broadside. Hear Armen read his poem here.
Honorable mentions for the Franklin and Hampshire county competition:
Janet Bowdan, "Northampton, February"
Rebecca Hart Olander, "Vermont"
Honorable mentions for the nationwide competition:
CM Downes, "Eastern Cliff: Two Tang Poets Travel to the River"
Armen Davoudian, "Kayak"
Lazarus Trubman, "Awakening"
We at Slate Roof thank everyone who participated for their considerable time, work, and heart in preparing and submitting their poetry. The selection process was long and difficult; we received many excellent poems representing a broad spectrum of poetic styles and concerns. Each one was read by all of us. Our selection process was completely blind.
Price: $15.00, $3.50 shipping
Broadside
Letterpress, approx 15" x 11 1/2"
Ararat
When I left home I thought I was the raven
sounding the future for echoes of my voice.
Sunlight tore and stitched back sea and heaven,
and daily I renewed my prodigal choice.
Never, never. I turned my own name over
above the raving ocean, content to watch
my shadow and my image almost touch
once every day, forever and forever.
But when did I swap feathers with the dove,
coughing up splinters from the olive branch
I’ll never carry back? The shattered conch
of Noah’s ark was dug up from its grave,
but this is where I live now. Coo. Caw.
My house is made of straw.
Price: $15.00, >$3.50 shipping
Broadside
Letterpress, approx 10" x 22"
psalm 55.21
her speech is softer than butter,
but war is in her heart.
Lord, you have clothed the goose with bed-feathers
and given her the neck of a snake,
a yellow snake's eye and bite.
To the cow you have given silence
and a weight to block the wind,
the weight of a mother who falls asleep on her child.
In the gristled heart of the chicken, war;
war in the dance of the sparrow
defending her bowl of dust.
Men are like roses wearing all their weapons in daylight,
ruddy heads bowed a single night after cutting.
You made the man simple as a bullet;
he always breaks in by the same door.
Like winter he is seen a long way off;
like the volcano he can be avoided
By the woman who can take a season without fire,
who has plucked the breast of the goose
and sealed the barn against sparrows.
She has locked them out to freeze,
she sifts the grain through her bent fingers
Like the light tumbled hair of a girl,
a girl like a soft plum reddened by summer.
Lord, to the yew berry and the checkered snake,
to frog and foxglove you have given poison,
A bitter taste to the butterfly
and the green sprawl of the rhubarb,
But to the woman only a tongue,
like a cat licking her newborn into breathing,
like a cat rasping the meat from a bone.
About the winning authors:
Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and four poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree, 2015). Awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor's Prize in Fiction, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. Reiter is the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site with contests and markets for creative writers. Visit JendiReiter.com.
Armen Davoudian's poems and translations from Persian have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Narrative, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His work has been supported by scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Millay Colony. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at Stanford University.
