2020 Broadside Poetry Prize Winner
Ruminate Magazine is thrilled to share with you the winners of the 2020 Broadside Poetry Prize! The winning pieces were selected by our final judge, Kristen George Bagdanov. You can order the limited edition Broadside here!
Winner: "Gladiolus" by Michael Dechane
Michael Dechane received his MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University in 2018. His poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Ekstasis, Apalachee Review, and elsewhere. His poem “Jake’s Parade” was selected as a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2020 International Poetry Contest. He is currently working on his first full-length poetry collection, featuring work that explores the landscape and many oddities of his home state. A native of Odessa, Florida, he currently resides in the Netherlands. He says, "Writing poems is one of the ways I try to keep up friendships with the dead and the dying, as well as all of us living and longing to burst into being even more alive. I write poems as an excuse to be curious, a means of learning, and most of all—to create places where we can make meaning together." Read more about his recent publications and creative collaborations at michaeldechane.com/poetry.
The judge Kristin George Bagdanov writes,
This poem is not a still life but a still, life. It is a delight in decay not to glorify it but to consider how it is a condition of living. “Gladiolus” asks us to see withering as a transformation that produces new colors and redefines what we perceive as edges. To see the radical possibilities for living that remain dormant when we view death as life’s antithesis. These potentialities must be given space to bloom and attention to be seen, demanding new language to articulate their “multiplying opacities.” A beautiful poem well suited to this season when the diminishment of life is brightly stitched through every living thing.
Honorable Mention: “A Kind of Lightining” by S. Yarberry
Finalists:
"On Buoyancy and the Loss of the Ability to Worry" and "Pasta Maker" by Janine Certo
"Fly Casting" by Nadine Ellsworth-Moran
"Elijah on Mt. Carmel" by Kristina Erny
"Memento Mori: Purple Orchid" by Jennifer Franklin
"The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement" Paul Cézanne, 1866" by Adam Gellings
"The Supposition that Bodies Can Be Imagined" by Anna Leahy
"Icy Grey Things" by Susan Lorenzo Blayer
"Shadowboxing" by Christopher Louvet
"The Stream" by Stelios Mormoris
"‘Ata, 1966" by Jeremy Paden
"The Cold" by Emily Portillo
"Equinox and All" by Lisa Rosenberg
"The Heraclitus Effect" by Claire Rubin
"Gifts for the Sultan" by Mark Stevick
"Perseids" by Crystal Stone
"Carapace" by Catherine Turnbull
"Geronticide" by Anthony Warnke
"Bananas in Isolation" by Rex Wilder
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.