The Charles Simic Prize 2024

We created the Charles Simic Prize to honor our friend, teacher, and mentor after his death in early 2023.

This year we received 371 submissions from around the world. Our editors had the extremely challenging task of narrowing submissions down to 25 to pass along to Dana Levin, who selected the winner.

Here's what Dana had to say about the process and why she chose this year's winner:

I went on the hunt for a poem that carried some of the spirit of Charlie’s work: vivid images; a touch of the surreal; a conversational approach to diction and tone; a bit of dark humor, or irony, or the absurd—cut with a shiver of disturbance. Ultimately, I hoped for a jolt of surprise: a sudden flick of a switch in my work-a-day mind. The poem “Witness Statement” by Oz Hardwick has these qualities in spades. I followed the plot turns and the speaker’s confusions with real curiosity, and loved how the poem both surprised me and intensified its emotional stakes as it unfurled towards its end.

Thanks to the finalists for the tonic of vivid reading, and to Bill Schulz for the opportunity to encounter them. A bow to Tina Cane, Janine Certo, Holly Iglesias, and Erica Reid for submitting poems I read over and over. 

Congratulations to Oz Hardwick, the recipient of this year's $1,000 prize and to Janine Certo, who received this year's Editor's Choice Prize, a signed first-edition of Charlie's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The World Doesn't End.

We're pleased to present the work of the 25 finalists in the following pages. Our thanks to all who participated in this year's contest.

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Jeri Theriault

Girlhood

I keep coming back to the Virgin

who entered via DNA & lodged

in my growing organs

like the cache of pearly

ova nestled in my fetal ovaries

little promises my childhood

ballast Hail Mary full of grace

theme song of all the Catholic

girls—who obeyed & prayed

never thought much

about our souls

in third grade we danced

a Mary May dance in blue dresses

& swayed with the grace

I would later see in Botticelli’s

young Mary—the way she held

her hands her blue cloak.

We studied everything

about that moment with the angel

when we were eight

but by thirteen we wanted

high-heels & kisses unclasped

our rosaries & rolled our school skirts

short. Mary appeared

in stained glass & blue paintings—

her official pigment—ultramarine

from lapis lazuli elevated

to immaculate icon & called

the Queen of Heaven.

I’d rather think of her in undyed

linen when the angel appeared

far too holy for the unsuspecting

girl who however frightened

knew she must say yes

on that starch-scented afternoon

at the very end of childhood.

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Jeri Theriault’s recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Her poems and reviews have appeared in THE RUMPUS, THE TEXAS REVIEW, THE ATLANTA REVIEW, HOLE IN THE HEAD REVIEW, and many other publications. Her collections include RADOST, MY RED, (M)OTHER, and SELF-PORTRAIT AS HOMESTEAD. Jeri lives in Maine.

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Annette Sisson

Deep in Milkweed

My grandfather shuffled

his family to a few

sloping acres he’d wrangled

in the country, a crudely

framed shack—shallow

footings, foundation,

studs, flimsy roof.

No insulation 

or running water, a single

woodstove, old

sheets for bedroom walls.

He’d thought to finish

the house by fall, collapsed

into pneumonia, lost

his job. Winter crept in.

His sons lined

the tarpaper shell with newsprint.

They slept in mittens,

coats over sweaters, three

to a mattress. Between

coughs, he swore he’d plumb

the place, put up

drywall when spring swept away

the ice. In the warm

seasons, he prayed each

day for easy

breath, died before the parched

leaves dropped.

His children, angular and thin,

rambled the hill

deep in milkweed. Sharp

pods scraped  

their skin as they scanned for monarchs.

Tufts of floss

released, ribboned the empty

heat, the sky.

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Annette Sisson has poems in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust and Moth, Cloudbank, Lascaux Review, Blue Mountain Review, Cider Press Review, Tupelo’s Milkweed Anthology, and others. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in October 2024; her first book was published by Glass Lyre in May 2022. Her poem “Fog” won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s 2019 poetry prize; her work has also placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, Lascaux Review’s poetry prize, and many other contests. She has received multiple nominations for The Pushcart Prize or Best of the Net. https://annettesisson.com

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