Earlier this year we decided to have a poetry contest. We read many poems. We enjoyed them all. But we liked one person’s the best. This person is now involved in a very special thing. (S)he will have a collection of poems published in book form in 2010. Dark Sky Books is the publisher. This is exciting. We will all do our best. We felt this person’s poems were snappy, imaginative; they took us to weird places and made us reconsider the meaning of words. Sometimes we overheated while reading them. Other times we shivered with cold. They are grand poems. A handful of them have been published in literary magazines. More of them will be collected here for the first time. It’s still a bit early for Christmas. But we are smitten with good cheer. We wish good cheer to all the fine poets who submitted their work, we wish good cheer to our readers, and we wish good cheer to our winner…
SETH BERG!
As the winner of our first Poetry Contest, Seth will have a collection of his poems printed in a paperback book and published, for all the world to see. We’ll keep you posted as the book takes shape, and when, exactly, you’ll be able to get your hands on it. Till then, here’s one of Seth’s poems. It’s called Distance and was originally published in the Connecticut Review.
Congratulations, Seth! And thanks again to all those who participated.
– The Editors
Distance
Struggling to swim upstream,
a minnow flashes its underside,
a piece of submerged cutlery
suspended in the magic hour.
I want this jeweled relic
to be unamazing, to not hold
my attention as it now holds itself
in determined lateral sheen.
I tell myself to think of other things:
coins, mirrors, galaxies,
but the minnow flicks its tail
westward and snaps me back
into worshiping reflection,
back into standing still,
back into believing
we have the same face.
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Having grown up in the world’s largest Amish settlement, Seth Berg developed a rather adventurous imagination at an early age. He received a BA from the University of Toledo in 2000 and an MFA from Bowling Green State University in 2003. His poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, Lake Effect, JMWW, Chiron Review, BlazeVOX, Pike Magazine, Dark Sky Magazine, Disappearing City Literary review, 13th Warrior Review, and Wordrriot. In addition to writing, Berg is a sculptor and painter in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he teaches and lives with his photographer wife Ashley, their hobgoblin son Oak, and their 12 year old English Bulldog Bob.
