“Horses” wins the knightville poetry contest.
The contest judge was New York Times best-selling memoirist and National Book Award-winning poet, Mark Doty.
About Christine’s experimental prose poem, Mark Doty writes:
“The poem is artfully understated; the speaker lays out a series of moments and invites the reader to draw connections between them. The form the poet has chosen feels just right, since this poem eschews the dramatic spotlight of the line, with its power to emphasize, in favor of the quieter, steady movement of prose. “Horses” is quietly devastating in its portrayal of an isolated speaker whose memories only serve to make her body seem more vulnerable and less reliable. But is there something comforting in the steady work of horses wearing a track into the grass? The speaker tells us she is not “horsey”, but the horses here serve as emblems of physicality, of the body as something both dangerous and durable. This multivalent quality makes the figure of the horse seem especially alive, and points movingly toward a speaker uncertain of the fate of her own body, a speaker subtly portrayed as desolate but not without hope.”
The New Guard will publish “Horses” in its summer/fall 2018 issue.
The New Guard
is a contest-centered, independent literary review, publishing 35+ emerging writers each year:
“We proudly publish in print, with the exception of our online feature, BANG!, a page on this site that publishes three short works by a single writer for a full month at a time. The New Guard is here to showcase newcomers alongside established writers, and to juxtapose tradition with experiment to create a new dialogue.”
Mark Doty:
is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Deep Lane
(W.W. Norton, 2015), a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: art and ardor, animals and gardens, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008 and won the National Book Award for that year—in their citation, the National Book Award judges wrote, “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis.” Doty is the first American poet to have won Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, for My Alexandria (1993), which also received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other collections of poetry include: Turtle, Swan (1987); Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume, School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005).