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About Pushcart Prize Nominations
The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in their annual collections. Winners of the Prize have included the likes of Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford and John Updike, to name only a handful. No wonder simply being nominated for a Pushcart makes you feel as if you've won something.
Each fall, editors from small magazines and independent book presses worldwide are invited to submit up to six nominations. The nominations may be any combination of poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs or stand-alone excerpts from novels. Translations, reprints and both traditional and experimental writing are also welcome.
Announcing IPA's Pushcart Prize Nominations for 2025
The Iowa Poetry Association's Editor and Associate Editors have collaborated to select nominees from this year's Lyrical Iowa 2024. Please join us in congratulating and wishing these nominees success (listed alphabetically by author).
Joshua Borgman
WE MAKE OUR OWN MOUNTAINS
We have no mountains, only corn.
From the ruins of wild grasses, we've made ordered files
of seven-foot forests that cover hundreds of miles,
and we grow them only to grow more corn.
more is destined for adventures in hybridization,
the expectant pollen doomed to sterilization -
the plucking of the children who trudge the rows. Harvest comes and we make our own mountains
from surplus seed piling up at every elevator,
abandoned without a single protector,
hopefully oblivious to the snow and rain. These mountains of corn taunt me with an indifference
That tempts me to climb and sink down into their kernels.
Phoebe Bubendorfer
PENTIMENTO
She was born between two realities
her body in one, desires in another.
with razor blades,
the lid from a tomato
soup can. Her mother, beat down
by her own heartaches
failed to notice
the locked door
the rusty blooms
on her daughter's white socks
the cut that wouldn't heal. One night with a yolk-colored moon
shining through branches
of the old sycamores
she walked into those trees
and never came out.
Shelly Hamlin-Rodrick
HOPE
The sunset on my drive home
was ginger and crimson-
gleaming clouds like fingers,
a palm in purples,
fists of dusky blue!
a fiery womb of a photo,
that I could not take-
pull the car over; it'd be gone. I wanted to paint it,
or compose its sound, though
I could not truly speak-
all those angled colors!
If I could go toward that light,
I would not be afraid.
Kevin Hosbond
(trauma)
the things pile up-
that bottomless mouth at the
end of your driveway,
my hill of unwashed garments,
slices of words on our plates
Hilary Naab
KETCHUP
I hate ketchup.
It's not ketchup's fault.
Ketchup didn't do anything to me.
It's just every time I see a crimson pool on a plate
I'm taken back to being seven -
to Bosnia, to the war, to the refugee camp -
to being covered in chicken pox and
the doctor camouflaging me from head to toe
with a bright red paste.
It looked like blood.
I thought I was going to die. That we were all going to die.
Some of us did.
But I lived and came to America - to Iowa -
where they put ketchup on everything...
except for steak.
Ketchup on steak is a big mistake.
And I don't make mistakes.
I survive.
Maeva Wunn
HYACINTHS
It's the third day of Spring
and death is coming
on light, winged feet
like the withering that starts
at the tips of every petal
a darkening so gradual
that it's hardly ever seen
it creeps slowly up
every stem and swallows
every bud until
the husk that's left
is nothing like
the man that we remember
from childhood.
To read poems of previous IPA Pushcart Prize Nominees:
IPA Nominees for the 2024 Pushcart Prize
IPA Nominees for the 2023 Pushcart Prize
IPA Nominees for the 2022 Pushcart Prize
IPA Nominees for the 2021 Pushcart Prize
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