Brain Mill Press Celebrates

 

Poetry Month

 

2016

To celebrate National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press is proud to dish up delectable poetry to whet your appetite. We’ll feature established and emerging poets, as well as BMP authors and friends, who tantalize with stylistic feats and a fusion of whimsy and the piquant. Poetry begets more poetry — dig in!

–C. Kubasta, Brain Mill Press Celebrates Poetry Month coordinator & contest judge

BMP National Poetry Month Contest

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.

We invited poets to submit their poems (any style or form) of no more than one hundred lines to our Poetry Month contest. We particularly encouraged submissions from poets of color, women, and LGBTQIA+ writers. The editors selected a poem or poems each Saturday in April as the editors’ pick(s), and BMP poetry month coordinator C. Kubasta chose a grand prize winner.

Selected poems were published on the Brain Mill Press website and social media channels. Editors’ pick poets were awarded with a Brain Mill Press print book (and associated art gift, if available) of their choice. The grand prize winner received a full set four Brain Mill Press Mineral Point chapbooks from 2015-2016, associated broadsides, and a Brain Mill Press T-shirt. Poets retained all rights to their work.

Poetry and Essays

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Elizabeth Berry

2015 Contest Winner

At eighteen, my mother,
as lean and brown as a leather strap
covered her face and veiled her
reasons
to follow my father a hundred miles
from home.
Three kids in three years.

Elizabeth Berry’s poems are arresting for their authority and the intensity of their anger at where the women they speak of find themselves. Honed with plain language and sharp metaphor, her poems resolve nothing in their ending lines — and yet push to the reader to catharsis.

BMP Poetry Broadsides

Tanka & Me broadside

Tanka & Me broadside

A commentary on art-making and grace. The text is printed in two colors on 110-pound 100% cotton Crane Papers Lettra, overprinted on the chapbook’s signature interior illustration of a keyhole, which also appears as a printed motif.

My Seaborgium broadside

My Seaborgium broadside

A commentary on a mother’s love. The text is printed in two colors on 110-pound 100% cotton Crane Papers Lettra, overprinted on the chapbook’s signature interior illustration of the element Seaborgium, which also appears as a printed motif.

Fair Day broadside

Fair Day in an Ancient Town broadside

Reproducing lines from the poem “The Presentation,” the text is printed in two colors on 110-pound 100% cotton Crane Papers Lettra, overprinted on the chapbook’s signature interior diatom illustration, which also appears as a printed motif.

My Tall Handsome broadside

My Tall Handsome broadside

Reproducing lines from the poem “pretty pretty princess vs. the underworld,” the text is printed in two colors on 110-pound 100% cotton Crane Papers Lettra, overprinted on the chapbook’s signature interior illustration of an empty ball gown, which also appears as a printed motif.

Discover BMP Poetry

Tanka & Me

From “Me and Tanka”

You’re dull, she says, you can’t even

cross your eyes correctly. Your relationships last

five months because you turn so USUAL.

In your Secret Garden

you grow carrots and plastic wrap.

You like Lean Cuisine dinners.

You don’t have fancy shoes.

You hum poorly. And you’re dull.

I know, I say.

Then how did you make me? she says.

Grace, I say.

PURCHASE NOW

My Seaborgium

“Lullaby”

Now I want joy to arrange you.

Forget the spool, the queue.

May you crow from the prow.

Be your element’s namesake

and alive, know it. My Seaborgium.

My little radish bugaboo, my

pillowfoot jeweler. Sweetgum,

sing, sing to wake the water.

PURCHASE NOW

Fair Day in an Ancient Town

From “The Presentation”

This is my lordosis: look: my part.

It wants to feel the syllables your heart

putters.   I want your obsessive pulse

to part with mine only when universe

and starlight disentangle.   Dumb stud, come;

I’ll be the radiator and the heat

it hisses.   I’ll paint the memory

of you on my closed coffin lid and lard

my arteries with your untamed beauty.

I’ve assumed the posture of a rapt

ocelot:   I moan my smell to you:

swell with me:   boil with me:   glue

your sternum to my sternum and we’ll do

what blue jays do until Orion snaps.

PURCHASE NOW

My Tall Handsome

From “pretty pretty princess vs. the underworld”

1

my tall handsome, you are always

hydrangea in my rib, popped open

always dazzle of salt on my punched lip

 

love of life

the he & me I will devour

 

we beneath black cherry tree

all fruits and crystals on your chest

 

you were my first body—now and always

forever and ever, in the pink bed rippling

amen.

PURCHASE NOW

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