Submit to the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest!

Omnidawn Publishing’s second annual chapbook contest
is open to all poets writing in English.

Judged by Ben Lerner.
Prize includes $1,000,
Fall 2011 publication by Omnidawn &
100 complimentary copies of the chapbook.
The entry fee is $15. All entrants
automatically will receive a copy of
the winning chapbook upon its publication.
Submission period: January 1 to February 28, 2011.
Accepting both electronic
and postal submissions.
For details, click on here.
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2010 Chapbook Winner:
Zach Savich’s
The Man Who Lost His Head
forthcoming in January 2011.

 

Zach Savich’s The Man Who Lost His Head wrestles with the irrational rationality of life as we dimly perceive it. Yet these poems elicit, like the ambiguity of life itself, our most fervent and strange fidelities. There’s such a thing as a willed poetic ignorance: it forms its own epistemological haven, and these poems live in that locale.  Thus the poet can ask “Does dark mean blank?” and, in the very asking, expand the horizon of possibility (that is, knowing) by which we recognize the interchangeability of absence and desire.  In that dark, we grope into and through the rudiments of our own longing, “melted to its presences.”  When Savich writes “I suppose I do believe in nothing,” his words resound as a positive statement of belief.
–Elizabeth Robinson, 2010 chapbook contest judge
 

The five finalists for the 2010 contest were:
The City Salutes Itself, by Jackie Clark (Jersey City, NJ)
verbs without a past, by Robin Powlesland (Taos, NM)
Dogbook, by Kate Schapira (Providence, RI)
Quarry, by Shannon Tharp (Seattle, WA)
Break-Night Dawn, by Erin Wilson (Berkeley, CA)

(Names listed in alphabetical order; no ranking order to finalists.)