Results of 2021 Chapbook Contest
Brandon Shimoda has selected Tawanda Mulalu's "Nearness," as the winner, and Haolun Xu's "Ultimate Sun Cell," as the runner-up. 🎆
We are thrilled to announce that we will be publishing both of these stunning chapbooks! ✨
Brandon writes:
“I cannot help but feel that judging a poetry contest—that judging poetry, poems—is a strange and sordid thing to do, because the process of choosing is, in part, a process that takes place in the strange and sordid vacuum of the judge’s mercurial relationship to reading. Plus, it is lonely. And yet, it is also a great privilege, because it means spending time with—and peering into—work that is on the verge of being brought into the world, and into a larger kind of judgment that is the vacuum torn open, that is life. All of the finalists—all of these chapbooks—are astonishing. All of them are filled with work that has never been seen before—that I, at least, have not seen before—by which I mean work that is unanticipated and irreducible, and that is, therefore, already changing what I know about poetry. For that reason alone, I love them, and am eager for them to be brought into the world, so that you can love them too.
I often have no idea what I think or how I feel about an experience until it transforms, in my turning away from it, into a memory, especially one that I cannot shake, or am otherwise forced to confront. That is when a relationship begins, and also, if I am paying attention, and lucky, when understanding begins. All of these chapbooks transformed into memories, and into relationships, but the one that has lodged itself most fully in my consciousness is Tawanda Mulalu’s Nearness. This is the chapbook I have chosen.
Tawanda Mulalu’s Nearness is, as a collection of poems—and as a compilation of visions and encounters—a profound and beautiful statement of the self, and of the ways in which the self generates—and reverberates—a community of feeling, feeling throughout community, and back again. The poems are panoramic yet precise. They illuminate self-determination as world-remaking, world-remaking as arrangement, arrangement as preparation, preparation as precarity, precarity as love letter, and love letter as an almost posthumous kind of fidelity to feeling. The opening and closing poems (Prayer and Poetry in America), to cite two of the most immediate examples, are hard-winning atlases, virtuosic memorials in multiple dimensions. Although what they truly are, and what they, more truly, will become, is beyond anything I might be able to say about them. And the precise panorama in between. I am excited for how this work will evolve in the company of you, imminent readers. Tawanda Mulalu’s Nearness will, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, shift the scenery.”
On runner-up Haolun Xu’s “Ultimate Sun Cell," Brandon writes:
“I have the uncanny feeling, reading Haolun Xu’s Ultimate Sun Cell, that I am watching a painting or a film being made—stroke by stroke, frame by frame—from the vantage of the afterlife. (A plein-air, impressionist, speculative, mise en abyme documentary.) Central to that feeling, and to that quality, is Xu’s intuitive and spellbinding inventory of a world at cataclysmic odds with its own intentions, and the individual’s conflicted place within it. His poems, unguarded and porous, transcribe a clear-eyed and tender Revelations. Which is maybe what awaits us off the end of the unfinished world: a poetic accounting of how the lucid definition of our experience was informed, all along, by a sensibility at once hyper-present and posthumous. To listen to your own dreams is a matter of dignity, Xu writes, but to listen to another’s – is prophecy. What if your own dreams are another’s, i.e. what if another’s dreams are your own? Xu’s poetry exists in—and invents, necessarily and profoundly—the flourishing space in between.”
Stay tuned for excerpts from each chapbook in NDR 11.2, and the physical chapbooks in the near-future!