Monday, October 19, 2020

 new page for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize:


http://www.factoryhollowpress.com/tomaz-salamun-prize

 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize now open for submissions. Deadline: March 15, 2021.


$500 + chapbook publication + 1-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia


To submit: https://verse.submittable.com/submit

Monday, June 08, 2020

2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize winner + Editors' Choice selection

Bianca Stone selected Jake Bauer's chapbook Big Pool, Oh as winner of the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Bauer will receive a $500 honorarium, a free one-month residency at the Tomaž Šalamun Centre for Poetry in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and 10 copies of his chapbook, which will be published by Factory Hollow Press.

Because we have been receiving so many excellent submissions, last year we started an editors' choice selection, in which one of the remaining finalists' chapbooks is selected for publication. The 2020 editors' choice selection is Zoe White's Hyperspace. Her chapbook also will be published by Factory Hollow.

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

4 days left to submit to 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize

$500 honorarium, free one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia and chapbook publication by Factory Hollow Press + 10 free copies of chapbook.

A second chapbook will be selected from the entry pool for publication as an Editor's Choice.

https://verse.submittable.com/submit

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize submissions

Submissions for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize are now open. The winner will receive $500, publication of their chapbook by Factory Hollow Press, and a one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia at the Tomaž Šalamun Centre for Poetry. Bianca Stone will judge.

Also, the editors will select a second chapbook for publication by Factory Hollow.

Sunday, April 07, 2019

2019 Tomaž Šalamun Prize winner + new editors' choice selection

Emily Pettit selected Jennifer Liberts' chapbook Tender Organs as winner of the 2019 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Liberts will receive a $500 honorarium and a free one-month residency at the Tomaž Šalamun Centre for Poetry in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and her chapbook will be published by Factory Hollow Press.

Because there were so many excellent submissions, this year we started an editors' choice selection, in which one of the remaining finalists' chapbooks is selected for publication by Factory Hollow Press. The 2019 editors' choice selection is Dalton Day's chapbook Un. His chapbook also will be published.

Friday, March 01, 2019

15 days to enter the 2019 Tomaž Šalamun Prize

deadline March 15, 2019

$500 + 1-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia + chapbook publication by Factory Hollow Press

final judge: Emily Pettit

https://verse.submittable.com/submit

Monday, November 12, 2018

2019 Tomaž Šalamun Prize now open for submissions

deadline: March 15, 2019

Winner receives $500, chapbook publication by Factory Hollow Press, and a free 1-month residency in downtown Ljubljana, Slovenia

To enter:

https://verse.submittable.com/submit


Wednesday, March 07, 2018

R.I.P. Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956-2018

Lucie Brock-Broido

That Same Vagabond Sweetness

Odd I cannot remember a time
When there was no World. I am

At home, at callow home
Worshipping the train, the Elsewhere's 

Metallic sweetness, scissoring. A pack
Of blessings lights upon my back.

There are thou happy.
The noise of the world's tracks

Made magical alarms me. There
Are thou happy too. And the half

Blown catweed & the vagrant
Sky & the vacant apoplectic

Bed shiftless in its vacancy, I stop.


[from Verse, Volume 12, Number 3]

Friday, March 02, 2018

new issue of VERSE

Volume 34 (the final print issue of Verse) is out and includes poetry and prose portfolios by



Vincent Zompa (winner of the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize)

Monica McClure

Julie Carr

Dan Rosenberg

Molly Brodak

Ryoko Sekiguchi (translated by Lindsay Turner)

Arianne Zwartjes

Daniel Biegelson 

Ben Gaffaney  

Kell Connor

Jaclyn Sadicario

Matvei Yankelevich

Dara Wier


To order a copy, visit https://verse.submittable.com/submit


Sunday, January 14, 2018

Now open to entries for the 2018 Tomaz Salamun Prize!

deadline: March 15, 2018

The winner's chapbook will be published by Factory Hollow Press. The winner will receive $500 and a one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

To submit, visit:

https://verse.submittable.com/submit


Tuesday, July 11, 2017

4 days left to submit to the 2017 Tomaz Salamun Prize!

https://verse.submittable.com/submit/41191/tomaz-salamun-prize-2017


Winner receives $500, publication by Factory Hollow Press, and 1-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Monday, April 24, 2017

NEW! Poem by Natalie Lyalin

Natalie Lyalin

SO WHAT, THE CLOUDS

So what, the clouds
with a piercing gold haze
so a red feather stuck to my foot
The gull’s squawk, so what
Mother, father, horseshoe crab
I thought I spotted them all in
the glare of sunset
So what, the smudge of life
sooting bleached branches,
disinfecting the parts that need it
So what, until we say goodbye
we had a weekend together
and I helped pick out your dress
What does it matter
The tin chandelier pocked with holes
So what the rain
I never visited or cared too much
The bottles and woven baskets full of sea glass
Hair grit, white towel snapping in the wind
Birds circling their condos
An abundance of banana bread
Celebrating America not on the fourth of July
but on the 16th, when nothing is happening
Surprisingly I am somebody’s mother
I have no council
I turn on the lights
The sun crests the bank of pines pushing on the dusk
While overhead a group of rockets take off from Cape Canaveral
making an arc toward heaven 

Sunday, April 02, 2017

2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize

The 2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize is open for entries until July 15, 2017. 

$500 + chapbook published by Factory Hollow Press + one-month residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Judge: Matthew Zapruder

The Tomaž Šalamun Prize is open to poets at any stage of their career. Previous publication is neither a requirement nor a restriction. You can enter if you've published no books or 100 books.

Translations into English are acceptable if the author is still living and has given written permission. 

Prose poetry and hybrid forms are also acceptable.

The winning chapbook will be published by Factory Hollow Press in Amherst, MA.

The prize winner will receive $500, 10 free copies of their chapbook, and a free one-month residency at the Tomaž Šalamun Center for Poetry in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

If a translation wins the prize, the translator will receive $500, 10 copies of the chapbook, and the residency, but the original author also will receive 10 copies of the chapbook.

Individual pieces in the chapbook may have been published in print and/or online journals, but the chapbook itself must be previously unpublished.

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please withdraw your submission immediately if your submission is accepted elsewhere.

Matthew Zapruder will judge the 2017 prize. Current/former students and close friends of the judge are not eligible. (If in doubt about your eligibility, query editorversemag@gmail.com.)

Entry fee: $12

Deadline: July 15, 2017

To enter: Submit a poetry chapbook (18-28 pages) to the link above.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

NEW! Review of Elizabeth Powell

Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances by Elizabeth Powell. Anhinga, 2016.

Reviewed by Nancy Mitchell

Elizabeth Powell’s compelling new volume of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, winner of the 2015 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry and published by Anhinga Press, is the saga of one psyche’s circuitous, courageous evolution to wholeness as it reclaims and integrates the fragments of its shattered self. Like a classic epic, the book is substantial; its 109 pages are divided into four distinct, yet integrated parts, and the arc of each furthers the narrative arc of the collection, the tension of which lies in “the tug of war between what you are and what you want to be.” In lines barely held in check by semi-formal constraints of rhyme and rhythm, the poems pellmell the reader through poems like “a toboggan threshing me down a hill.” The wrangle of this struggle is underscored by erratically shifting tones via inventive syntax and humorous, original neologisms/verbalizations: “I lollygagged and sofatized as I proceeded with the CNN-induced lobotomy dream of life,” and

            The world, violent full of sex,
            the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond
            double-o-sevening in
            (CARE PACKAGE, WITH RIDDLE AS MISSIVE)

as well as with startling enjambments:

            …This poem is made of me and I it. It doesn’t worry
            about irony or stance and only odd incidence and fact and doesn’t care
            if it tells the truth about what will happen to my face
            or behind my back….

Part One, the heftiest section, worthy to stand on its own as a separate volume, serves as the Genesis, the creation story of the collection, as it introduces the origin of the book’s structure along which uncanny parallels to the speaker’s life are plotted:

     Around then, I read my father’s 1960s Compass copy of Arthur Miller's
     "Death of a Salesman" and began to understand why his sister called
     him Willy Loman. He had eaten the dream and it made him sick...But
     my father’s sister never stopped with the Willy Loman talk, and so we
     seemed to be acting that play as our family drama.
(“AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I”)

From a longstanding intimacy with the American drama—“This entire book is in love with Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and has been in conversation with it for a good, long time,” according to Powell’s notes—and subsequent internalization, a world is created into which the title character is called forth from the a shadowy subterranean of unconsciousness, or “my doppelgänger under the bed, snoring and talking and laughing in her sleep,” to inhabit this world with full autonomy: “I read it again and again, until the doppelgänger moved from under the bed to the top bunk.”

Powell’s doppelgänger is an alchemic tour de force, deftly echoing Plath: “and then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you,” claims a poem also titled “Daddy.” Willy Loman’s daughter, paradoxically whole and black hole, becomes the self into which other selves, shattered “the way the Rolling Stones sing about” by seismic psychological pressures, are absorbed. Because the doppelgänger can successfully assimilate undifferentiated cultural identities—

            Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I'm
            matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley
            don’t-worry-about-me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan
            casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m
            the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan
            and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land
            but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the
            murmurs of lovely & also ... Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles.

—as well as the trauma of sexual abuse—

                                                …small child who is taken into a room with
             an ex-convict and made to drink peppermint schnapps and lie on his
            polyester orange and yellow bed and black out until she walks from
            the room and is shown his medals of valor from a war she doesn't
            understand. She didn’t know peppermint that way until she came
            to dislike the sunniest days. (“Sense  Memory: (Re)-Experiencing Time Travel”)

she becomes the trustworthy, although admittedly imaginary confidant, sister in Pasternak’s “sister life,” the ma souer of the speaker. Both protective mediator and arbiter of memory, the doppelgänger will become the the reliable narrator, even as she speaks as a foil to other characters throughout the book, but only with the speaker’s complicity or permission:

            My retinal flashes made no sense until I realized they were someone
            else’s story trying to live through me. That sweet doppleganger, brother-
            sister, evil other, good girl! The story kept banging at my red front door…

“Someone else’s story” is also the speaker’s; by opening the “red front door” she intuitively and courageously allows the necessary psychic split into a stronger double who, acting as a “second,” descends into the hell of the past and faces down the demons of abandonment and estrangement, before assimilating them and returning whole to tell the whole story.

In the poem “LIVING TRUTHFULLY UNDER IMAGINARY CIRCUMSTANCES,” the speaker speaks for “both of them” with, “We both want to be whole, so the story can be told.” In my notes I’ve written, “Or maybe: We want the story to be told so we can both be whole.” Elizabeth Powell’s stunning, evocative Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, is, like any odyssey, to be read in parts, slowly, carefully, and reflectively, like a psyche recovering the shattered parts of herself.

Monday, July 11, 2016

2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize deadline

Submissions for the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize will be accepted through July 15. Dara Wier is the final judge.

Wednesday, July 06, 2016

NEW! Poem by Tiffany Higgins

Tiffany Higgins

Can Starfish?

in the form of a Googlet, a found poem formed from Google dropdown suggestions generated by a beginning phrase

can starfish bite

can starfish see

can starfish feel pain

can starfish survive out of water

can starfish get itch

can starfish hurt you

can starfish hear

can starfish reproduce

can starfish eat humans

Friday, May 13, 2016

NEW! from Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's Journal with Closed Eyes

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

from Journal with Closed Eyes

Translated from the French by Luke Hankins



The August heat pierces me to the core. The flies too. And his patched-up pajamas. He had to sell his gold watch to some neighbors . . . Soon, very soon, his life will be over. Sitting on the edge of the bed, his breathing shallow . . . He asks me for a cigarette.

First I stand up, then I find the pack, next . . . But is there really an order to things? I’ve made and repeated these motions for such a long time, always the same, backwards and forwards, I extend my hand, I find the pack, I light the cigarette, I know it won’t burn to the end.

The sun through the windows is already making me sweat. The next room over, the children are waking up. The lapping of their little voices.

You could begin a book this way. Or end one.

~

The pages have scattered on the beach. Letters fall off, wrap around rocks, fray, twist, attach to the roots of plants, strange organisms, writhing seaweed . . .

A melody rises from the earth. Suddenly I recognize it, it’s the one I put on in the car sometimes. Then it changes. I hear footsteps underground . . .

Untangle these letters, gather them from the sand, it’s my job, I’m the one who has to do it, I know it.

I’m the one who invented them, drew them with colored pencils in my notebook.

And I can’t move, my feet, my steps . . . 

This seaweed that grows out of me . . .

~

The nights are very long and the days pass unnoticed. I hear thoughts like little motors whirring in the air. Others’ thoughts and my own. Living, keeping me company, more alive than those to whom they belong.

Over the years some have grown hard with rust; others, weakening, falling apart, still delight me. So I wind them up, set the little motors going, and I listen to them . . .  

I’d have a hard time waking tomorrow to find only silence.

~

It’s three in the morning, the dead in their graves. I think of them. Thought is alive, warm, it gathers itself, forms a kernel that attaches itself to the world, and it begins to move, to shift.

I give the dead this gift, the only one possible.


The dead—a formless mass on which we walk.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Dan Ivec / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist

Dan Ivec

[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]


The Nocturnal Biennial


Every second year

on the shortest night of the year

the prisoners are allowed

to escape it is a folk tradition

begun in the days when

we were all prisoners

and knew what it was 



to live or to want to live.

Friday, April 22, 2016

E.C. Belli / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist

E.C. Belli

[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]

Apology

Another battering, brown
Grass. It’s hives, you see, not the sky
I want to talk about. Clean 
Sleep. Sundown is a musing 
Ruin, a tired gaze. Do you
Know it by any other name?
I am supremely content— 
Though I despise board games
And Sunday afternoons.
Put on a decent face, I’d like to say 
Some days. We’re all crushed 
With longing. Last week, 
I left the dog with someone 
Who almost let him die. It didn’t matter
To her—his trench-deep eyes,
Four sturdy legs, a trodden heart
Endless with hope; all the 
Little things that make you
You. One person in the world
Loved him, you see—made him
Less wretched, which is to say
Easier to maim without remorse. 
Love is always a good cause 

For injury.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Todd Melicker / 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist

Todd Melicker

[2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist]

Though not to love, yet love to tell me so

list rain as an
accomplishment

list a bird tucked
in the lip

list sorrow, patience,
list spoons

list tongue-tied
lift, ill-wresting love

the people of the 
tongue—why

i should grow
pressed fog

spills in the 
valley

i should grow

hinges