Judge’s Citation by Cassandra Cleghorn, Kristina Marie Darling, & Jeffrey Levine


 
 
The selection of a poem for a broadside carries a special charge: that the poem be one that warrants repeated readings, and that lends itself to visual design. The materiality of letterpress work, its embodied and tactile nature, can heighten one’s experience of the poetic image, typography, white space, and the lovely arc of narrative. Broadsides also focus the eye quite insistently, prompting us to attend to a writer’s most subtle gestures with respect to lineation, scale, and the use of the page as a visual field.  With the right poem, a broadside can become a doorway into a truly memorable textual landscape.  And all three of these poems instantly suggest themselves as a designer’s dream.  With that in mind, the editors of Tupelo Press are pleased to announce that we have chosen Laura Lauth’s “Because It Is Our Custom Not to Eat Our Dead,” Anne Marie Rooney’s  “Brink,” and Susan Tichy’s “To Speak of One Is to Speak of the Other” as the winners of the First Annual Tupelo Broadside Prize.  Please join me in congratulating Laura Lauth, Anne Marie Rooney, and Susan Tichy.  These three outstanding poems were chosen from over three hundred and fifty entries.