THE CHRISTINE PROSE POETRY AWARD
We hope to begin this again for the year 2024.
About This Award
This award has been named in honor of a person who holds a special place in the heart of Managing Editor Chila Woychik, the half-sister she never met, and who has since passed away.
Beginning in 2018, Eastern Iowa Review will annually announce what the managing editor chooses as the best prose poem accepted during our regular submission period(s). No reading fee. This will be an honorary (unpaid) award.
Please familiarize yourself with what we consider to be a few of our favorite prose poems by reading our page here.
This award has been named in honor of a person who holds a special place in the heart of Managing Editor Chila Woychik, the half-sister she never met, and who has since passed away.
Beginning in 2018, Eastern Iowa Review will annually announce what the managing editor chooses as the best prose poem accepted during our regular submission period(s). No reading fee. This will be an honorary (unpaid) award.
Please familiarize yourself with what we consider to be a few of our favorite prose poems by reading our page here.
2021 Winning Poem by Jean Biegun
GREEN BOWL
Loving is scary because it zooms. You are glued to a something, I think, and then you feel whenever whatever zips away the pain that is too much. Liking I can do. Liking is this bowl of a rich Chinese green not seen anywhere in the slick city. Liking is enough sometimes, but not really. I mean, the fabulous, fantastic stuff my roommate carefully cooks every evening, and with it we sip a good merlot or some white. Wanting, if maybe I want a thing, do I love it? Is the thread of desire I send to it something? I love [blank]. I refuse to think of that which wants to be wrapped in my spinning web mind. After all, freedom comes in letting go (my mother’s old hippie posters taught me) and don’t we want to be free?
2020 Winning Poem by Ingrid Andersson
THE WIFE WHO MADE A WISH
Spring ravished her rooms, bearing musky narcissus and sweet-fleshed hyacinth blooms. It slipped in through the open window while her husband was away, hunting chamois in Switzerland, slipped in with the call of a cuckoo. Neighbors began to wonder at the abandon everywhere, her hair coming down and how her blouse-front fell away, the sound of music spilling out her windows. She wished to be one with everything: sun, wind, earth, rain and set the goat free to bring life into the place. That is how her husband found her—gamboling in the garden with the goat—his gun in hand and dried blood of chamois on his coat. She pulled her blouse together and tried to explain, the Cuckoo and Spring, but the sound of it made her laugh, and when he began to stammer of scandal and something bestial, the house stank of something bestial, she laughed and laughed until she burst, like Spring, into flower.
2019 Winning Poem by Amanda Moore
HAIBUN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Though she knows better the girl still says nightmere a relic of early language when she also said fleamingos and girled cheese. Nightmere as if to belittle: merely at night, merely a vision and not some charging mare galloping through dreams to tear and divot the fragile terrain of sleep. She holds onto this verbal tic and I my mother’s ear, which hears her steps outside our room past 2 am, her tall 13-year-old body filling the doorframe and a whimper of explanation: nightmere. And so she log rolls between us stiff at first, no longer familiar with the sensation of family bed, sleeping between the two bodies that made hers. Soon she curls toward fetal, her body’s twitches a metronome to better dreams, her mind shifting to work that can’t be done in the waking world and she rolls toward me, slings an arm around my waist and sighs.
How rare these days to
be her comfort—I can’t sleep
from such delight.
HAIBUN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Though she knows better the girl still says nightmere a relic of early language when she also said fleamingos and girled cheese. Nightmere as if to belittle: merely at night, merely a vision and not some charging mare galloping through dreams to tear and divot the fragile terrain of sleep. She holds onto this verbal tic and I my mother’s ear, which hears her steps outside our room past 2 am, her tall 13-year-old body filling the doorframe and a whimper of explanation: nightmere. And so she log rolls between us stiff at first, no longer familiar with the sensation of family bed, sleeping between the two bodies that made hers. Soon she curls toward fetal, her body’s twitches a metronome to better dreams, her mind shifting to work that can’t be done in the waking world and she rolls toward me, slings an arm around my waist and sighs.
How rare these days to
be her comfort—I can’t sleep
from such delight.
2018 Winning Poem by Mercedes Lawry
WHERE STRENGTH HAS WRIGGLED IN
Only the sabotage of a broken Sunday, hope speared and split to threads. Only the backs of old horses, slumped with time’s final descent. Plus and minus, the reach for clarity, as if the conversation could be painted in a pretty yellow, specked with cornflowers, set loose to contain the melancholy and the cleaved. What salvage might be tried? Perhaps the small successes will fuse to make a net, woven loosely but as sturdy and sure as spider-silk.
WHERE STRENGTH HAS WRIGGLED IN
Only the sabotage of a broken Sunday, hope speared and split to threads. Only the backs of old horses, slumped with time’s final descent. Plus and minus, the reach for clarity, as if the conversation could be painted in a pretty yellow, specked with cornflowers, set loose to contain the melancholy and the cleaved. What salvage might be tried? Perhaps the small successes will fuse to make a net, woven loosely but as sturdy and sure as spider-silk.
2nd place: Amy Karon's "Arizona Drought"
3rd place: Travis Truax's "Driving Back"
Honorable Mention: Jesse Holth's "Piñon Crackles"
Honorable Mention: Ellen Stone's "Your Grandpa Was a Foxhunter"
3rd place: Travis Truax's "Driving Back"
Honorable Mention: Jesse Holth's "Piñon Crackles"
Honorable Mention: Ellen Stone's "Your Grandpa Was a Foxhunter"