It’s with great pleasure that we’re able to read, publish, and reward work by poets writing from or about the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada.
The prize winning poems and honorable mentions will be published in our upcoming Summer issue.
Thanks to contest judge, poet and literary critic Robert Archambeau, to our readers Ellen Jaffe, Elisa Karbin, and Michael Salinger, and to GLR Contributing Editor David Bowen for taking the reins on this, our first contest.
First Place:
Michael Dunwoody, “Essex County Sonnets, Sort Of”
Second Place:
Dylan Weir, “Johnny Appleseed Carving His Jawline Into Mount Rushmore”
Third Place:
Terence Huber, “The St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco, Welcomes You”
Honorable Mentions:
Kathe Gray, “Bickford County Swamp, 1872”
Mary Haley, “Dreaming of Ore Boats”
Amorak Huey, “It Occurred to Me Today That I Will Probably Die in Michigan”
Lynn Pattison, “Whose only carved out space is hunger”
Mark Ramirez, “On the Suicide of the Owner of the Cresceus Heights Trailer Park”
Janeen Rastall, “The Source of My Keenness for Winter”
Additional Finalists: Jeffery Bartone, Miriam Bat-Ami, Darleen Coleman, Ethel Davis, Ron Hayes, Tricia Knoll, Susanna Lang, John McCarthy, Timothy McNinch, Arthur Plotnik, Denis Robillard, Claire Scherzinger, Linda Leedy Schneider, and Glen Wilson