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Nimrod International Journal – Fall/Winter 2007

Volume 51 Issue 29th Annual Awards I Number 1

Fall/Winter 2007

Biannual

Jennifer Sinor

This awards issue of Nimrod represents the work of forty-nine writers, including an interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall in which he suggests we are seeing a surge in poetry’s readership and notes his fondness for poetry that “thrills in the mouth.” Given the sheer number of poems and short stories that received awards in this issue, it is difficult to highlight particular pieces.

This awards issue of Nimrod represents the work of forty-nine writers, including an interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall in which he suggests we are seeing a surge in poetry’s readership and notes his fondness for poetry that “thrills in the mouth.” Given the sheer number of poems and short stories that received awards in this issue, it is difficult to highlight particular pieces. The poetry ranges from concrete to prose and includes such stellar works as Seth Abramson’s “Gideon Asleep by the River,” a three-stanza poem that runs its course in one glorious sentence. The narrator wonders what would happen if Gideon learned not “to gravitate with the urgency of light / towards men whose least warps bend / the planes of history further yet / in the direction of equity” but instead “how to boil / water, to peel off the blotched skin / of a potato with skill.” Another wonderful poem by Nicole Cooley received an Honorable Mention. The title and first line read, “I’m Starting to Speak the Language / of disaster.” A poem of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, the narrator takes a “tour of the Gone,” reading the landscape for all that is not there, a place that seems to be “Missing a whole story.” The fiction doesn’t have the same punch as the poetry in this issue, but there is such a goodly number of both that all readers will find something that delights.
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