Pushcart Prize nominations 2010
UPDATE (12/1): Here are our six nominations. Thanks to everyone who left comments and emailed suggestions.
“24” by Barbara Young (New Classics issue)
“Tantric” by Clayton Michaels (Watermark)
“Relics” by Sherry Chandler (Health issue)
“Sea of Stars” by Dick Jones (The Crowd issue)
“So soft his neck, so distant from the thought of stone” by Jee Leong Koh (New Classics issue)
“Apart” by Aline Soules (Chapbook Finalists 2010; originally published in The Houston Literary Review, May 2009)
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Once again we are soliciting suggestions from readers on our nominations for this year’s Pushcart Prize. (See last year’s post for more on our thinking about this.) Any work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry that has appeared in qarrtsiluni since January 1 would be eligible: basically, the Health and New Classics issues, the chapbook series, and the currently unfolding Crowd issue. Remember to hit the “Older entries” link at the bottom of each page to navigate through an issue. Grab permalinks by clicking on the titles.
Please leave suggestions in the comment thread for this post (or if you’re shy, email us: qarrtsiluni [at] gmail [dot] com), up to six nominations per commenter. And tell us why. We are much more likely to be swayed by articulate arguments and personal reactions than by numbers of “votes”; this isn’t a popularity contest. Please don’t nominate your own works, or tell all your friends to nominate them for you! Aside from that, anyone is welcome to make suggestions, including first-time readers, but we will give greater weight to suggestions from those who regularly comment here, indicating a long-term engagement with the magazine.
We need to print out and mail in our nominations no later than December 1, so we’ll be making our final decision before the end of the month, and will announce the nominations by an update to this post, as before. In the meantime, we’d really appreciate your help in combing through the archives. Incidentally, last year, although none of our six nominations made the anthology, one of them was also later nominated by one of Pushcart’s official advisors (we don’t know who): Khadija Anderson’s poem “Islam for Americans.” It felt a bit like a vindication of our crowd-sourcing approach.
—Beth and Dave
qarrtsiluni 
Brent Fisk’s “Recovery.” Why? “The incision/ is a crack of light, a line”
Maggie Cleveland’s “The Constellation of the Water Snake” because she knows Crow is tricky and anyone who uses the word “coruscating” so fiercely deserves respect.
Barbara Young’s “24”!
‘Of 10 or More in a Room’ by Scott Owens. He’s a wonderful poet!
from the “Crowd” issue: Christine Rhein’s “Sparrow’s, Poet’s Deaths”
powerful, poetic and policital at the same time. intriguing format, too, with the 2 versions / realities in one form.
I second “Of 10 or more in a Room” by Scott Owens. It simply explains such a universal experience.
“On Seeing ‘Envy Barn’ in the Real Estate Listings” by Amy MacLennan. Brilliant exploration of want versus need -the things we desire.
“June Cleaver Considers Divorce” by Jill Crammond Wickham. Because of this: “stripped naked, bones hung out like a shop-keep’s hopeful shingle.”
‘Apart’ by Aline Soules from the ‘Chapbook Finalists 2010’ Category.
It is intense, focussed and stands as a justification for something existing when the existence itself ceases to occur.
A disclosure, Holly Anderson is my friend, but my nomination of her American Sentences, ‘On Suzanne’ (Health Issue), is not due to friendship, but rather admiration for a poet/writer whose words are consistently, fiercely apt and spellbinding. In an elegy to her father she says, ” . . . your own meticulous work habits have inspired me to . . . write hard and bright with tight true corners.” And so she writes over and again — hard, bright and true — but also with an intensity that grabs up and re-lights dirt & sky and everything else in between as she goes. ‘On Suzanne,’ written on the death of her dear friend, is a brilliant portrait, an elegy that is tenderly haunting as is befitting words for a friend, but also more — these ‘American Sentences’ are most surely a relative of Ms. Anderson’s ‘supernova remnant’ that ‘releases heat inside the Milky Way.’
Donna Vorreyer’s https://qarrtsiluni.com/2010/06/15/the-monsters-receive-their-briefing-on-millennium-park/ is a poem I’ve returned to several times since my first encounter with it. It delights me on a number of levels — it’s a poem about a place I love; it’s a poem that makes that place even richer and stranger than it already is; and I like how it’s infused with both playfulness (it is, after all, a poem cheekily giving advice to monsters) and loneliness (the closing lines seem so very Chicago — the cold means people don’t fuss about inessentials, but it does also keep people from getting close).
Good choices! Best of luck to the writers.
Bravo to all the nominees!
Crazy Love by Pam Uschuk
The Question of Rapture by Claire Keyes