Donald Justice Poetry Prize Previous Winner

2010 Donald Justice Poetry Prize winner

Ned Balbo
The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems

One of the things I love about The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems is how pop culture reference to the monsters and heroes of horror films, science fiction novels and television series, sprinkled throughout, are not glibly hip, but both personal and universalizing -- we see them for the modern mythology they are. The father of modern horror, Edgar Allan Poe, himself provides a thread running through this book-length meditation on adoption and identity, on love and heartbreak, alienation and belonging. "Hart Island," a multifacited long poem about New York City's potter's field, an island of the nameless and unclaimed dead, orphans, the homeless, convicts -- lies at the tell-tale heart of the book. Caught up in Balbo's fluent, contemporary vernacular, one tends to overlook the dizzying array of forms he employs it in: blank verse, ballade, ghazal, ottava rima, pantoum, villanelle, sestina, sonnet. That is also because these forms prove never to be mere clever exercises in technique; rather, we find they are vessles of almost uncontainable longing.

-A.E. Stallings
Judge, 2010 Donald Justice Poetry Prize

The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems
Ned Balbo
ISBN: 978-0-9785997-2-0

$14.95

The Invisible Man's Escape
After James Whale's 1933 classic

In that long moment, knowing the police
were near, the inn's proprietor still bleeding
from the push downstairs, my face still bandaged,
black sunglasses on, equipment damaged,
hope dashed, patrons risen at the noise
to call for my arrest, I felt a speeding,
sick sensation: mirrored in those eyes,
now black voids, was the answer, was the way
back that I'd sought and lost, the broken piece
I'd missed or thought mere accident, a stray
thread dangling carelessly....Worse was to know
my one escape was to unravel, now,
the gauze that gave me form: to feel not fear,
but only certainty that nothing's there.

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West Chester University
Poetry Center Poetry House
West Chester, PA 19383

2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize winner

Julie Kane
Jazz Funeral

Following the success of her first two volumes, Body and Soul and Rhythm and Booze, Julie Kane has written a brilliant new book that proves once again how surprisingly vital the sonnet can be. From the transgressive "Bitch" to "Mockingbird" with its "pretty girl in crosshairs of a gun," Kane's opening sequence parallels the jazz funeral's "March to the Graveyard," mordant without ever slipping into the maudlin, highly spiced and knowing.

In the book's second section, a "Hobo's Crown," we get a single life remembered--that of Robert Borsodi, a writer and independent theatrical impressario who made New Orleans his home and supported its artists. This "Eulogy" recalls the players and the coffeehouse where bare bones performances stood up against the violence of the world outside. Even here, of course, New Orleans is a storm-haunted city:

You never lived to see
the halls of Charity entombed with mold,
dead bodies strewn like roadkill in the streeets,
Borsodi's flooded like a toilet bowl.
Thank God for that at least. We miss your light,
warm as a campfire on a bitter night.

The third movement of a jazz funeral is "Cutting the Body Loose," in music an explosion of celebration., and here Kane's post-Katrina poems are fiercely unsentimental. Part elegy for a city and a way of life, part meditation on mortality and grace, this book is wonderfully, defiantly alive.

--David Mason

Judge, 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize

Jazz Funeral
Julie Kane
ISBN: 978-0-97859-971-3

$14.95

Mockingbird

That mockingbird could make me paranoid,
the way he's always got his eyes on me
(as if he were a cop in unmarked car)
from hidden stakeouts in the dogwood tree.
He wants to be the first to grab the chunksof
desiccated fruit from millet seeds;
like Pavlov's dog inside a feather-suit,
he's learned that I appear before he feeds.
I wonder, does he ever take a break,
relax his vigil, watch the butterflies?
Some nights I wake and shudder in my bed,
imagining those fixed, unblinking eyes,
or flash back suddenly to 21,
a pretty girl in crosshairs of a gun.

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West Chester University
Poetry Center Poetry House
West Chester, PA 19383

2008 Donald Justice Poetry Prize winner

John Poch
Two Men Fighting with a Knife

In spite of its rueful undercurrent of mortality, Two Men Fighting with a Knife is one of the wittiest books I have read inyears,full of an active thrust and parry. John Poch mines these poems from a rich vein of Americanvernacular. He's a raconteur ofTexas and "the old west ins and outs," offering a range of moods from anger to hilarity and grief, hewing close to actual lives, surprising us with crackerjack phrasing and vital talk. Who would have though poetry could have the seriousness of a knife fight staged with such comic aplomb?

Reading these poems is like listening to an eccentric talker who happens to enjoy rhyme, knows a lot of genuine characters, and might be a bit of a character himself. There is an invective against the cops of Denton, Texas, a sonnet crown about spinal surgery, a sestina devoted to "Folks who Never Got their Due." On the rare occastions when Poch indulges literary allusion, it's always with reference to real life, as when a stain on a wooden lamp evokes a beautiful meditation about Shakespear's Prospero and Ariel. That interplay of earth and air, reality and imagination, infuses every poem in Poch's new book, so unpretentious in its knowledge of human limits. As he writes in a marvelous poem called "Thirst": "If this is failure, wait. If success, / become the flower of a lantern looking / for its girl..."

Poch's vision and versions of America stay with you. This is a book to re-read with the pleasure of recognition.

-David Mason

Judge, 2008 Donald Justice Poetry Prize

Two Men Fighting with a Knife
by John Poch
ISBN: 978-0-97859-9797-9

$14.95

The Ghost Town

It need not be a desiccated wreck
of boards, completely uninhabited,
adobe bricks regressed to mud, hay. Heck,
it might be verdant and jackrabbited.

The wind might not lament; the gift shop door
could jingle bells, the jasmine candles wafting.
Beyond some seniors at the conveninece store,
you might observe a fisherman shoplifting.

But say it's vacant and bunch grass gray. Then torch
an image, scent, or song from your present life
to reconstruct the step, the stairs, the porch,
the house, town, two men fighting with a knife.

Much life the architecture of a sobnnet:
a step, and suddenly you die upon it.

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Order by phone: (610) 436-3235
Order by email: poetry@wcupa.edu
Order by sending $14.95 plus $3.00 shipping and handling to:
West Chester University
Poetry Center Poetry House
West Chester, PA 19383

2007 Donald Justice Poetry Prize winner

Kim Bridgford In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records

“She’s done it! Kim Bridgford now holds the world’s record for composition of sonnets on the topic of world records. She is also the very first poet to rhyme ‘connoisseurs’ with ‘chili peppers.’ In the Extreme is a wonderfully entertaining volume, humorous, wry, and appreciative. But it is much more than a collection of ‘paper quips.’ ‘Anything is possible when mind’s put to it.’ Here is strong evidence for that observation.” -Fred Chappell

“Kim Bridgford’s In the Extreme would be a considerable achievement for its simply being a flawlessly realized sonnet sequence; when you actor in that every poem is inspired by an entry in The Guinness Book of World Records it climbs to the level of tour de force. But when the poet devotes the last few sonnets to the life of Mike, the chicken who holds the record for having lived longest with his head cut off, the poem rises to a level of humanity (or chickenity) that is far above the usual plane. An amazing collection, full of wry humor and not a little pathos.” -R.S. Gwynn

The Most Sonnets Ever Written about
World Records. Like sleeping on beds of nails,
Holding rattlesnakes (plural) in your mouth,
Or hosting races between speedy snails,

This is not the sort of thing you ought
To let your children (or your neighbors)
Try at home, whether supervised or not,
Lest they end in a clinic, or the papers.

To save you from taking so great a risk
Or going to such trouble, Kim Bridgford
Has taken on the Herculean task.
This feat, which no one else has conquered—
No one from Alaska to Madagasc-
Ar—is (Guinness take note!) its own world record.

-H.L. Hix

In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records By Kim Bridgford June 2007 ISBN: 978-0-97859-978-2

The Most Lightning Strikes Survived

That would be seven. Try explaining this
When you are moving forward for a kiss:
That you can take a hundred million volts
And then go on. You have a kiss that melts.

While others hide in basements or the tub,
You’re in the open, where the sky can grab
That part of you that sizzles to attract.
You are a strange and undeniable fact.

And do we want this jolt of sex and love?
We say this love will kill us, but inside
We dream of what has been electrified.
We place our bets on temperate love to save,
Yet turn to see you with your hair on fire,
A symbol of our yearning and desire.

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Order by phone: (610) 436-3235
Order by email: poetry@wcupa.edu
Order by sending $14.95 plus $3.00 shipping and handling to:
West Chester University
Poetry Center Poetry House
West Chester, PA 19383

2006 Donald Justice Poetry Prize Winner

Kate Light
Gravity's Dream: New Poems and Sonnets

"Kate Light's third collection, Gravity's Dream, represents personal poetry at its best.... That she sounds like no one else has been a given since her first book appeared a decade ago. It is indeed rare that a poet's heart has been worn on her sleeve so lightly as in this gravity-defying volume." R.S. Gwynn

"Kate Light has been one of my favorite poets for years and years now. To my eye and ear, she operates as a full master, able to somehow communicate in three lines a depth of heartache and clarity that it might take a novelist three hundred pages to convey. Her work give me shivers." Elizabeth Gilbert, Author of Eat, Pray, Love

Gravity's Dream: New Poems and Sonnets by Kate Light June 2006 ISBN: 0-9785997-0-5

A CLEAR CONSCIENCE

doesn't mean just cleared of guilt,
but cleared of influence--to wake in a waft
of light that your own consciousness has spread;
when no one else's blood, or brainwave, has been spilt,
and you're following the thread of your own craft,
vibration left on the pillow when you went to bed.
Possessed of your own self, as it were--not forever,
but for one clear day; waking to make choices,
make songs, or muse on the union that will sway
you when you are ready, if you are ever
ready. The question is: how many voices
can you listen to, transcribe, argue with, obey?

You are told you are elusive, evasive,
impossible--and the arguments are so persuasive.

Order online by clicking here
Order by phone: (610) 436-3235
Order by email: poetry@wcupa.edu
Order by sending $14.95 plus $2.95 shipping and handling to:
West Chester University
Poetry Center Poetry House
West Chester, PA 19383