Ruminate Magazine Contest Winners

The winners of the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, sponsored by Steve and Kim Franchini, are featured in the latest issue of Ruminate Magazine. Li-Young Lee, the finalist judge, comments on the winner Nicole Rollender’s poem “Necessary Work,” saying that it “is a memorable poem, powerfully realized and emotionally true. Among the many virtues that recommend it are the vivid images, as well as a complicated music arising out of a deep unconscious word-counting and word-weighing. One can sense the poet sorting the music of thinking and feeling from the chaos of an outsized undifferentiated passion. But above all, it is the passion that I love about this poem, and how that passion is canalized by discipline to create a work of profound beauty.” This poem, along with the poems from the second place winner and finalists, can be read in Ruminate.

Winner
Nicole Rollender: “Necessary Work”

Second Place
Temple Cone: “What I Meant by Joy”

Finalists
Harry Bauld: “When You Grow Up Catholic”
James Crews: “For Those Weary of Prayer Calling”
Rachael Katz: “Animal Valentine”
Anna Maria Craighead-Kintis: “The Bosque Burns on the Feast of John the Baptist”
Becca J. R. Lachman: “Wait”
Laurie Lamon: “I stopped writing the poem”
Kelly Michels: “Static In The Dark”
Carolyn Moore: “What Euclid’s Third Axiom Neglects to Mention about Circles”
Shann Ray: “My Dad, In America”
Matthew Roth: “My Father Goes Out with a Chain in His Hand”
Wesley Rothman: “Long After My Grandfather’s Death”
Mitchell Untch: “Autumn”
Gary Whitehead: “Warren”