Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that Dana Levin has selected as winner of the 2018 Dorset Prize:
Inventory of Doubts by Landon Godfrey
From the Judge’s Citation by Dana Levin:
As we endure the oppressing weight of the Anthropocene Era, its civic and ecological degradations, I found Godfrey’s often funny, sometimes dark, always surprising anthropomorphic swerves a tonic. Inventory of Doubts is a book where a human is just another kind of animal, and a drinking glass is a deeply feeling creature. Godfrey gifts us an intimate world where “each time a blanket covers a body, it tries to keep the dusty soul alive through the night.”
Landon Godfrey is the author of Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review), selected by David St. John for the Cider Press Book Award, and two limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, In the Stone(Regional Artist Project Grant-funded) and Spaceship(Somnambulist Tango Press). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Runners-up:
Danielle Blau, peep
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Flare
Anita Olivia Koester, Cartography of Grief
Laurel Nakanishi, A Far Place
Finalists:
Jennifer Atkinson, A Gray Realm the Ocean
Bruce Bond, Choreomania
Kristen Case, Principles of Economics
Gillian Cummings, Of Rue and Violets
Adam Day, Strange Generation
David Deleon, Wheatfield Without Crows
Andrew Demcak, Lazarus
Rebecca Foust, Dream of the Rood
Rebecca Hazelton, gloss
Lisa Hiton, Afterfeast
Brandon Kreitler, Nothing, Lord
Rebecca Lehmann, Ringer
Lindsay Lusby, Catechesis: a postpastoral
Holaday Mason, The Weaver’s Body
Rosalie Moffett, Nervous System
Elizabeth Robinson, Being Modernists Together
Terese Svoboda, 40 Days/Nights
Jennifer Sweeney, Wildest
Semifinalists:
Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen
Kelly Caldwell, Letters to Forget
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Deke
Katie Farris, In These Animal Architectures
Marlon Fick, The Tenderness and the Wood
p.e. garcia, a formulae for how to go forward into the day
Steven Gehrke, The Ship of Theseus
Julian Gerwitz, TO X
Sarah Maclay, Nightfall Marginalia
Diane K. Martin, Hue & Cry
Martin Ott, Sharks vs. Selfies
Aimee Sands, Lexicon of the Granite Core
Catherine Theis, SOPHIA
Emily Vizzo, GIANTESS
Chelsea Wagenaar, The Spinning Place
Lesley Wheeler, She Will Not Scare
Tracy Zeman, Empire
We’d like to recognize and thank so very appreciatively our extraordinary panel of preliminary readers: Justin Boening, Lily Brown, Kara Candito, Farrah Field, Marcene Gandolfo, Joe Hall, and Angela Veronica Wong.
Finally, and no less important, we offer our deep gratitude to all who submitted manuscripts, and who, by your writing, join in the tireless, solitary, and so-important work of making poetry.
Please bear in mind that the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry is accepting manuscripts now and features an entirely different reading panel.