by Richard Jordan

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2023

The poems in The Squannacook at Dawn range from formal verse to free verse to prose poetry and are linked by the speaker’s experiences with water. While many of the poems revolve around fishing, they also explore the speaker’s relationship with the loss of his father, the peace of the natural world, aging, environmental change, and spirituality.

Enjoy a Video of Richard Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for The Squannacook at Dawn:

Each of the twenty poems that comprise The Squannacook at Dawn is so well crafted that the art is all readers experience, the craft a scaffolding that has been removed. Each poem begins with a sense of welcome and closes unpredictably, yet inevitably (i.e., no better ending seems possible). This is high praise, but it’s not my only reason for selecting this manuscript as winner of  The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize for 2023. Read together and in the order they appear in the collection, these twenty poems create what feels like a twenty-first poem: the chapbook itself. The poet has not only written twenty fine poems—none an imitation of another in content or form—but when read straight through, the poems provide readers with a tightly woven and beautiful verbal tapestry, each poem contributing indelibly to the chapbook’s larger context or story.

—Andrea Hollander, contest judge and author of And Now, Nowhere but Here

The art of poetry and the art of fishing come together in these deeply felt, beautifully observed poems. The attentiveness to word and cadence speaks to and for all that the poet notices, be it river currents or dragonflies or ospreys. The earth and the waters are also very much speaking, and Richard Jordan has listened carefully. The scenarios vary as they reflect the amplitude of memorable occasions, but the aim is true in poem after poem—a sense of gratitude to be in the undiminished splendor that is out-of-doors.

—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel and former Poet Laureate of Maine

The Squannacook at Dawn is the perfect antidote to an age of human beings anxiously awaiting the next ping of their cell phones. If you’ve ever wondered where fly fishers get their patience and why they don’t get bored, the answer is clear in this vivid, wise collection. It’s in poet Richard Jordan’s dad, an iridescent scale glued to his thumb/ glinting in the April morning sun. These poems, some of them gently formal, others prose poems, dissolve the work week in the natural world’s healing magic: egrets, otters, and of course, rainbow trout. Even Jesus prefers the river to the church here—not just for baptism but for beauty and peace. Jordan is at his best observing the specific: loosestrife, cognac pipe tobacco, Macoun apples, the “jug-o-rum” croak of a bullfrog, mist. Even if your dad never taught you how to tie a fly, you need to spend some time in the shade near the water with a copy of The Squannacook at Dawn.

—Christine Potter, author of Unforgetting and Sheltering in Place.

In The Squannacook at Dawn, Richard Jordan uses close observation of nature, strong memories, and exquisite language to evoke the holiness of fishing. He pulls the reader in with precise details such as in the poem, “Night Fishing with Otters,” where he describes five young otters at the edge of sedge and bulrush and the mother otter with a hefty, flapping catfish plucked/ from the mud. Whether he’s delineating moments spent fishing with his father, witnessing old men talking, or remembering a house that once stood by a creek, he leads the reader to feel at home in nature, to appreciate the fleeting beauty of the world.

—Judy Kaber, author of Renaming the Seasons and former Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine

About the Author

A Ph.D. mathematician by training and data scientist by vocation, Richard Jordan has been an avid reader of poetry for almost as long as he can remember and has been writing poetry for twenty years. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Tar River Poetry, Rattle (finalist for the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize), Little Patuxent Review, Sugar House Review, New York Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Rappahannock Review and Valparaiso Poetry Review. When not doing math or reading & writing poetry, he is most likely at a river or lake somewhere casting away. He resides in Littleton, Massachusetts, a short drive from the Squannacook River.

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by Tiel Aisha Ansari

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place, 2020

The Day of My First Driving Lesson was written in the wake of the author’s parents’ deaths. It is a deeply moving poetic memoir celebrating her parents and the tremendous impact they had on her life. Ansari explores themes of growing up as an expatriate, bereavement, grief, and celebration in this non-traditional collection inspired by a workshop taught by Penelope Scambly Schott.

About the Author

Tiel Aisha Ansari is a Sufi warrior poet. She works as a data analyst and professional curmudgeon for the Portland Public School District and is President Emerita of the Oregon Poetry Association. She now hosts the Wider Window Poetry show, promoting the work of poets of color on KBOO Community Radio, (https://www.kboo.fm/program/wider-window-poetry)

Her work has been featured by Fault Lines Poetry, Windfall, KBOO, and an Everyman’s Library anthology, among others. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, and Dervish Lions (forthcoming from Fernwood Press). She drinks coffee in the morning and tea at night.

Visit her online at knockingfrominside.blogspot.com.

Early Praise for The Day of My First Driving Lesson:

“I was learning to be the hero of my own story. This line from the poem “1975” could be the anthem for this powerful chapbook that traces the story of the poet’s family, an odyssey ranging from coast to coast in the United States, to Tanzania, and beyond. Alternating plainspoken narrative with vivid imagery, the poems also range through time, building a kaleidoscopic view of this interracial family’s life, challenges, inevitable aging, and the strong bonds that hold them together even beyond grief. The Day of My First Driving Lesson is a rare love letter to good parents and the legacy of compassion they leave behind.”

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020 and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

Tiel Aisha Ansari’s The Day of My First Driving Lesson reads like a memorable road trip through time, each poem noting a point of interest on the journey. Like the hermit crab in one of Ansari’s poems, its “jointed limbs…unfolding,” the family portrayed here settles into landscapes and cultures as different from each other as Pennsylvania and Tanzania, Hawaii and Oregon. “It took us fifteen minutes,” another poem recalls, “just to list the places we’d lived and why.” Ansari’s poems depict a life shaped by beloved parents and beloved homes, and fueling this collection is the question of how we navigate the eventual loss of those loves. A powerful exploration of what our families can teach us and what we have to learn ourselves along the way, The Day of My First Driving Lesson is a poignant, tender collection.

—Jennifer Richter, author of No Acute Distress and Threshold

A splendidly-woven blend of eulogy and memoir, Tiel Aisha Ansari’s stunning new collection of autobiographical poems, like a photo montage of worldwide family travels —deftly arranged by subject, theme, and intuition, rather than by chronology—is full of so much more than what happened where and when. Dedicated to her parents, who died in 2018 and 2019, these precisely detailed, deceptively simple and carefully nuanced poems let us see for ourselves, page by page, memory by memory, the emergence of the poet’s personal sense of destiny, as it was shaped within the context of family values and the freedoms they offered.Aware that the choices before her are “love, duty, [and] fear,” the poet— like the sheriff in old-time westerns—knows she has “to be ready whenever that noon train rolls in.” Readers, prepare yourselves to be swept off your feet by the brilliance and depth of love in this book, by the beauty and power of its understandings. I can’t begin to praise it highly enough.

—Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong

Enjoy Tiel Reading from Her New Book:

Tiel Aisha Ansari — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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by Marcia B. Loughran

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Second Place, 2020

Because everybody has a mother. And everybody’s going to lose her.

A collection of poems inspired by one woman’s relationship with her mother, the chapbook My Mother Never Died Before and Other Poems sounds heavy, but lands light. The first half includes poems written after the mother’s death. The poet focuses on the everyday, mundane details—what the funeral home visit was like, how birds felt like messages, the unexpected realities of life without one’s mother. The second half pulls back the camera to include poems written before the death, which capture the ups and downs of the mother-child relationship. Wry humor and a companionable narrative style invite the reader in to one particular take on a universal story.

About the Author

Marcia B. Loughran won Mrs. Mott’s prestigious haiku prize in fifth grade at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and resumed her writing career thirty years later. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Verdad, Spoon River Poetry Review and elsewhere. Marcia’s first chapbook, Still Life with Weather, won the 2016 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Prize. She reads her work in various bars, bookstores and black-box theaters in New York City and the Catskills and is a regular at the Irish American Writers and Artists’ Salons. Marcia is a nurse practitioner and lives in Queens, NY.

<https://marciabloughran.com>

Early Praise for My Mother Never Died Before:

My Mother Never Died Before is a joyful read, full of surprises. Marcia B. Loughran shows her versatility and variety while bringing a welcome dose of humor to this collection, which is hard to pull off in poems about death. The many familiar scenes here—shopping for caskets, cleaning out papers after a parent has died, touching their intimate objects like breath mints and combs—are all painted with such clarity and reality. Loughran takes a risk by beginning with the “after” poems and ending with the “before,” but the gamble pays off beautifully—the innocence of “before” makes the “after” all the more poignant in retrospect.

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020 and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

In our family, kitchens are yellow./ But yellow is a wide road, Marcia B. Loughran writes in “Differences of Opinion,” one of a dozen in her exquisitely-rendered palette of  poems My Mother Never Died Before. Loughran is a master colorist, depicting the sort of home I always wanted to grow up in or, at least, have next door: The one with that yellow-walled kitchen (the exact shade being Button and popcorn/ a three-year-old’s drawing of the sun./ Dandelions, daffodils), a patchwork quilt to comfort us/ moments of incredulity, and most of all, full of good company with whom to spend time—one of this book’s primary pleasures.

Another is its understated wit: It’s hard to laugh/ and be sad/ at the same time,/ like trying to keep your eyes open/ when you sneeze, Loughran writes in “Phone Calls” a poem that in part deliberates, with a certain gallows humor, on the comical nature of neck braces. “Burdened Vessel,” on the other hand, exerts a breathtaking gravitas, using nautical imagery as a metaphor for the sacrifices of caretaking, a stunning achievement of magical realism which resonates as deeply as her soggy cough/ a foghorn we ignore/ like the radio.

Throughout, with the strength of language precise yet lyrical, odd but familiar, full of heart though refreshingly void of even a hint of the saccharine, Loughran has written a eulogy that would make any mother proud, even (or perhaps especially) when she allows, in “Inheritance,” that I don’t miss her/ much.

—Lissa Kiernan, author of Two Faint Lines in the Violet
and Founding Director of the Poetry Barn

In these twelve terse, keenly observed, and often heartbreaking poems, Marcia B. Loughran excavates and articulates the liminal space of grief, telescoping in and around the strangest of moments—when you lose the person who gave you life. Loughran expertly captures the puzzlement and unmoored nature of losing one’s mother. And in each poem, she gives us tantalizing clues about who was lost and who was left behind. The mother at the center of these poems emerges as someone who was witty, adventurous and, above all, kind. I found myself longing to sit in her yellow kitchen while making home-made Christmas ornaments over a cup of tea, with milk from a bone china jug. The love between the mother and daughter in this volume is not flashy, it feels quiet but deeply rooted and the grief the daughter experiences is a subtle ache, encapsulated by Loughran’s perfect lines, I feel like calling my mother./ Nothing urgent, more/ like I have nothing/ to say and she was always/ the best at listening to nothing/ all the nothings that happen in a day.

—Cusi Cram, playwright, screenwriter and Arts Professor at Tisch School of the Arts

Marcia B. Loughran’s vulnerable, heartfelt poems brought me comfort I did not know I needed. Her clear, honest imagery portrayed simple snapshots of daily life that brought my Grandma back to me. Anyone who has felt alone and lost after the death of a loved one will be comforted by Loughran’s honest telling of her own grieving. Through her profound poems, Loughran bravely explores the pain of death contrasted with the power of memories.

—Lillian Sanders, author of Navigating the Afterlife and Other Reasons to Cut Class

ENJOY MARCIA READING FROM HER NEW BOOK:

MARCIA B. LOUGHRAN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2021)

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by C.W. Emerson

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Third Place, 2020

Off Coldwater Canyon explores the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles. The poems contained in this small volume hold a haunting, unmistakable relevance for those living through today’s near-universal experience of global pandemic. Echoing an era described by the poet as “the impossible time,” they hold out the possibility of survival in the midst of great sorrow and loss, and the attribution of meaning and purpose to the life that remains.

About the Author

Poet and psychologist C.W. Emerson, raised in western New York’s Finger Lakes region, now lives and works in Palm Springs, California.  Following a varied, non-traditional career path as musician, celebrity assistant, and fundraising executive for The American Foundation for AIDS Research (Amfar), Emerson received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Fielding Graduate Institute in 2007.

C.W. Emerson is the recipient of the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, as well as awards and honors from The Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, New Letters Press, and others. His work has appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, december, New Ohio Review, and The New Guard. Off Coldwater Canyon is his first published chapbook.

Early Praise for Off Coldwater Canyon:

Tender is the word I thought of while reading Off Coldwater Canyon. This is the story of a young man, a paradise he found, and how that paradise—the gay community of Los Angeles in the early ’80s—was destroyed by the AIDS epidemic. Emerson’s poetry is so honest, its narrative so clear, that his compassion runs through every line: in the care he gave to his dying friends, the comfort he later tried to offer as a caregiver for strangers, and the blunt descriptions of the hollow aftermath and long road to recovery. This is a big-hearted poet, and a book that remembers and doesn’t look away.

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020
and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

In this breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly personal elegy to friends and lovers lost in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, C.W. Emerson maps a journey from innocence hungry for experience to experience hungry for lost innocence. Off Coldwater Canyon is not only an elegy to all those men who died too soon, but to a whole lost world of sensuality, possibility, daring. And if there’s no way back to that particular world, Emerson ends his suite of poems with a path that opens toward another.

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

The radiant from which Off Coldwater Canyon emanates is the body’s own perishable luminosity, these poems the lyric record of the body’s trajectory as a falling star—meteoric, brief—during the height of the AIDs pandemic: While these poems possess the power to make a reader weep, Emerson, himself, never succumbs to a poet’s vainest temptation: to eulogize mourning. Instead, Emerson dignifies the paths of those who have crisscrossed his own with a limpid accuracy that pinpoints and transpierces the essence of our fleeting existence and names it, a quality that destines this collection to become a classic in league with Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats.

—Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium

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