Congratulations to the finalists for the 19th Annual Slope Book Prize! We received over 200 submissions this year (!!!), which we narrowed down to eleven finalists. We passed these on to judge Samuel Ace. While he picked Isaiah Hines’ null landing as winner, we wanted to celebrate the finalists. They all deserve to be published, read, thought about and wrestled with, and shared widely. They awed us in form, content, and sheer ambition. Moving from explorations of gender, inheritance, violence, language, nature, nation, death - and so, so much more - to moments of descriptive beauty to impassioned cries for a better world, these writers are doing daring, vital work. It’s also worth noting that several of these manuscripts were finalists last year. We were delighted to see them again!
We want to give a thank you to everyone who submitted during our reading period. Every single submission we received was read by multiple editors and thoroughly enjoyed. While we can’t blurb you all, please know you have our deepest thanks and respect.
Find blurbs and short excerpts below. Enjoy!
108 Olivia by Maria Flaccavento
This is the second year 108 Olivia has been a finalist for the Slope Book Prize. We were incredibly excited to see the collection again. Maria Flaccavento does something powerful within the pop culture character of Olivia Benson. She creates a savior, one who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty in the process of protecting us.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“OLIVIA,
Today in the garden, I buried two eggs in the soil between the tomato plants. Some old tradition about planting the seed of intention, then new life.
Remember in the lot next to the burned down burger joint? How you were clawing through the dirt for that small girl? Tearing through the dirt with just your hands.
I’m digging too. I’ll die digging, I’ll dig until we come out on the other side, digging farther and farther and all the way down.
Is it farther than that? Is it far enough yet?”
BLOODLINE by Ansley Clark
BLOODLINE is a collection about inheritance. The oh-so-human inheritance of disease borne through genetics, but also inherited violences, traumas, narratives, politics, and survival tactics, all swirled together in the messy web of social relations. Put another way, Ansley Clark presents us with a macro lens view of what it’s like to live as a human in the historical continuum.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“a familiar object hovers husk-lunged so close I can hear it breathe
what follows follows me
underground in clear spools unravels”
DISCORDIANS by Whitney Kerutis
DISCORDIANS is a modern take on classical Greek themes and myths. It’s part Alcestis, part conversation with women of myth, part extended dialogue between Woman, Man, and Eris, part choral melos, part stage direction. Whitney Kerutis give readers a front row seat to the daily violence experienced by women. What’s remarkable is how this violence is presented – far from being subject to, and channeled through, a patriarchal gaze, it’s instead offered as plain fact. This is a collection of fearless, urgent poems.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“Dear Antigone,
In an auditorium full of children, I light a match to my face. As in, don’t talk me out of it. When I say I have been on more than one bus with a woman speaking to herself, I mean I am cursed by a handheld mirror’s weaponized sun. I try to block out the women’s voices with my earbuds blaring, but still the soft hiss of their speeches are a deafening static, a nursery to care for the pressure of voicelessness.”
Esau by Dan Rosenberg
Another collection making its second appearance as a finalist, Esau by Dan Rosenberg is a sort of spiritual hallucination. Taking its title from the name of Jacob’s older brother, Esau enacts the small, ordinary moments of life and enchants them with something between the sacred and the profane. It presents life as we wish it might be and are terrified it could be.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“stuck ingloriously elsewhere but
this letter finds me reading subway
cars out loud people mark a border
around me saving who from whom I
wonder at the red letter raw and
sweating they moo the commuters they
quiver all plugged in and shiny they
wait for the end of the metal’s scream
and enter consumption the letter
watches me watching and talking to
me in the blasts some air like wing beats
wets my face with difficult light I
wash thirteen days away in this light
each hair comes to hunger on my head”
ECHOES by Erika Kielsgard
What does it mean to be human on a planet in which humans are a minority species? How does the experience of life in our frail bodies compare to that of an anemone, a mantis, the wind? What about the experience of death? These are the questions Erika Kielsgard sets out to answer in ECHOES. Part poem, part prose, this collection is a cataloging of the grief we feel living, dying, and surviving.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“Swollen eye of titan arum,
carrion scent summoning
bone from catacombs’ ossuaries;
snail shells in soil at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise:
some wholly contained,
some unoccupied or secondhand”
Girl Country by Ansley Moon
Girl Country is another collection making a return appearance as a finalist. Dedicated to “the 50 million missing Indian girls,” this manuscript is a deeply felt example of art as praxis. It gives voice and agency to these 50 million women while also interrogating the author’s experience of America and its whiteness. Ansley Moon’s deft use of photographs, passports, headlines, and even mathematical tables combine with her poetry to create something which is both rhetorically powerful and emotionally moving.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“I miss tearing through flesh—
or leaving my indentation
on an upper thigh.
Mine remember the brush of your knuckles,
the erosion of skin
beneath the jaw. Or sucking
your finger until my first tooth erupted.
Despite years of metal & force,
they map the terrain & migrate back. ”
Freak Lip: An Epistolary by Julia Cohen
Julia Cohen takes a diamond sharp eye to the social position of womanhood in Freak Lip: An Epistolary. To whom is she writing? Gertrude Stein, family members, Henry James, Alexandra & Nellie, Spooner, Mary Ruefle, and Jamie McCartney, among many others. Questions of addressee fall away as text messages, letters, and photographs are woven into the collection. It becomes clear the recipient isn’t important – rather, it’s us, the readers, who get the pleasure of experiencing Cohen’s astounding insight.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“I’m also not yet aware of Gertrude Stein, not for another 7-8 years, when I’m in a college English class, when I realize she is one of the few writers who feels her way through a sentence without trying to affix a set meaning to her experience. When she explains “by written I mean made. & by made I meant felt.” When I feel a tug of both love & jealously toward the precise tumbling outward of her sentences. Feelings, like baby foxes making their way out of the dark den into the clover. ”
Hecho by Kell Nelson
Something remarkable is occurring with language inside the pages of Hecho. Drawing on Spanish words existing inside of American English – taken from a range of writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich – Kell Nelson writes a collection that’s an ever-present, unfolding translation while also being something wholly its own. Hecho calls to mind the idea of the always already.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
Him or Her or Whatever by Tyler Friend
The poems are sensual and embodied, and display a physicality that often becomes more than the language they are made of. Sex and the body are written in a way that defies gender. In fact, the poems have a gender of their own. Tyler Friend writes with irreverence, humor, and sometimes deadly seriousness. We feel we’ve re-learned something from these poems - how language, in all of its mess and specificity, can be a worthy stand-in for desire.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“I have a vodka cran, & you’ll order
a rum & coke, or maybe a whiskey sour.
What’s the word for the bit of arm
between your elbow and your shoulder?
I don’t know, but I like your those, & I want
to sit in the near-dark next to you, feeling
the slight pressure where our those are touching. This.
This is what I’m trying to talk about: the ability to remain
so fully present inside a silly hunk of meat, & not
try to race my way out of it. This. This is what I’ve learned. ”
majnun by Makmak Faunlagui
Have you ever read a poem so rich in image and language, so utterly itself, that you wanted to curl up and sleep inside of it? To wake up to the poem’s morning breath which, somehow, smells like gingerbread and bergamot? In majnun, Makmak Faunlagui manages to repeat this feat again and again (and again). Faunlagui takes seriously poetry’s dictate to surprise and delight.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“sucking on percebes
you alien goose barnacle!
your protuberances from shells
much like elephant trunks
shells like cleaved rocks
moss and ferns
laurelling your mouth
studded
beds of oregano
berms of bitter
green oranges
ornamental
and reflected
against hard curved
sheets of glass
forged in izmir
vertical jungles transplanted
from south america
vermouth-blotted serviettes
bearded segway instructors ”
THE EMPTY KINGDOM by Sara Akant
The Empty Kingdom by Sara Akant is another example of a collection that foregrounds its own textual nature and the malleability of language. Moving between Old English, English, and Turkish, Akant tells a modern-day fairy tale that’s all the more moving for its starkness. These poems are ambitious and powerful.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“It is 7am on the oversized ottoman.
It is raining in the ambulance called yabanci.
Me ? I drink sour cherry juice while floating through the office
of the newly minted airport. Centuries old men shift their aprons
into groan. In the fourth empty Playland, I decide to
let them dream. I sing to him in earnest – Baba, let them sleep.
What is it now, to be 32 at 3am, false lumps
in the breast and still humming Bruce, still falsely
humming Bruce. The dog –
I say – it barked for noon.
Shut up you horn, some bebek moaned.
But that was twenty years ago.”