The editors are delighted to announce the winner of the TQ11 “Call and Response” Poetry Contest.
Andrea Read, “Fox Wants Death, Rabbit Wants Flames of Thread”
From Darcie Dennigan’s Judge’s Citation…
“‘Fox Wants Death, Rabbit Wants Flames of Thread’ is a script for an apocalypse. ‘Flames of Thread’ (what a phrase) brought my mind to that line from (of all things) a Delmore Schwartz poem: ‘What is the self amid this blaze?’ ... and then on from there: What will be uncovered if we follow the rabbit, whose mouth is full of iron rings and budget reports? The stage directions only awesomely complicate the question: ‘(poor rabbit is garbled, which means filled / with remorse).’ Where will we be taken if we follow the fox, who can speak and even sing, but whose tongue ‘is old shadow / a valley darker than a valley’? (And does that line remind you of the Wallace Stevens poem “Rabbit As King of the Ghosts”: “the shapeless shadow covers the sun”?) There’s so much lightness here in the writing– Andrea Read’s hand is light, is a living one, warm, but so capable of suggesting icy silence.”
Andrea Read’s poems have appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly, 3rd Bed, and most recently in FIELD, Copper Nickel, and Parabola (forthcoming). A recipient of a National Resource Fellowship and a Tinker Foundation grant, Andrea lives with her family in Somerville, Massachusetts.