Nov 7

Announcing the 5th Annual Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize

Poet Michelle Boisseau (1955 – 2017)

We’re stoked about our annual single-poem contest. We’ve already received more than a couple of emails asking when we would open the prize entry portal and, as promised, we’ve opened it in early November, after our fall issue had launched. Below these remarkable statements by Michelle Boisseau, said in response to questions from interviewer and poet R.T. Smith, about her poetics of the body (which have greatly shaped Bear Review’s aesthetic), and below the contest FAQs, you will find links to past winners, runners-up, and finalists.

Michelle Boisseau’s Takes on Image and Metaphor in Poems:

“The image has to work on the living, breathing body, the more ways the better. It’s useful to remember how Dickinson said she knew when something was poetry when she felt physically as if the top of her head were taken off. Now there’s a tactile image. Our culture emphasizes the visual so much that we often forget that an image can strike any of the senses—and often more than one at a time. And “all senses,” as “Cave of Hands” [in Among the Gorgons] puts it, “come down to touch.” The winter afternoons that Dickinson gives us and their certain slant of light oppress “like the Heft of Cathedral Tunes.” Note the press in “oppress,” the tactile that the verb carries as it tangles sight, touch and sound synthetically.

Striking images give us body knowledge, knowledge not just in our minds but what we feel in the finite body which responds to the rain and sun, the kiss and the rumble. Imagery I think is best when it makes us feel our creatureliness. The body reminds us we’re not immortal even while the mind dreams and dreams that we are. In a world where the Internet is always on and we can endlessly stream stuff into our phones, that tingling scariness that a good poem gives us ignites our sense of human frailty and ultimately what matters.”

“Finding what will suffice—as Stevens says—that’s why we write, to bridge the gaps, to understand, to open up what seems closed on us. When I’m trying to understand what the poem might be trying to show me or when I’m trying to work my way toward a discovery by writing the poem (or what I hope will be a poem), I feel my way in—through the “meaning” of the words (and the metaphors buried in their etymologies) but also by how the words sound. I often tell my students to think about the sound they feel the line needs, go after the sound, instead of trying to paraphrase some idea they have or event they’ve experienced. Sometimes the only way to peel things back is to create a feeling through a metaphor and to find the metaphor by going after the sound: the rhyme of Dickinson’s winter afternoons and cathedral tunes….

When kids are learning language around the time they’re two or three years old, they go through a stage called over-generalization (it’s handy to be married to a linguist as I am) where they might call any four-legged creature a doggy, or any round disk a moon. They discover likeness, and in a sense toddlers go through the same process our very ancient ancestors went through when they began to create human language. And that’s how we create and adapt new words all the time—like the buttons on a cell phone when we’re just touching a flat screen.”

Source: “The Mountains and the Swamp: An Interview with Michelle Boisseau” by R.T. Smith

Poets, please send us your best poems. Please take the tops of our heads off and lodge your image and metaphor in our gray and white matter. Every poet and editor and reader deserves this form of love via metaphorical violence, it’s true, but our readers, editors and contest judge Cass Donish are especially deserving this year. Give it to us good, please!

FAQS:

Q: What is it?

A: A single-poem contest in the name of poet Michelle Boisseau, a beloved professor to the founders of Bear Review and several of our journal’s early editors. The winner will receive $500.00, publication and designation as prize-winner in the Spring issue of Bear Review, a blurb from our judge, and an interview with an editor to also appear in the Spring issue.

Q: How many poems can I include in my packet and who will read them?

A: Send over one to three of your best pieces. Poet Cass Donish will judge the prize this year (check out his bio below) after poetry editors make their initial selections, so send us a few from the top of your stack.

Q: What are the dates?

A: We’ve opened our submission form on Submittable at midnight on Monday, November 1 and we will close it at the same time on Tuesday, December 31.

Q: What are the rules?

A: Only previously unpublished poems will be considered. No recent student, or current or past friend, of the contest judge may enter. Following CLMP’s code of ethics, those who have had classes with or have worked with Cass Donish in the past five calendar years are ineligible to enter the contest. We define “friend” as anyone who has met up socially, in-person or online, for any form of hanging out. If you’ve only met Donish at a reading or in passing on campus or at a conference, we would count this as a form of acquaintanceship, not friendship; if you’re social media “friends,” we would not define this as friendship, either.

Q: Will the judge name finalists or runners-up?

A: Yes. In addition to a winner, Donish will choose three or four other stellar poems as finalists, and we will publish and designate each of these poems as contest finalists in our Spring issue as well.

Q: How much to enter?

A: $15.00

Q: Why so much for a single-poem prize?

A: While we are a non-profit organization, we have administrative and events costs none of us teachers, librarians, and professional editors can cover out-of-pocket. Any fees we collect go back into supporting the journal; we are deeply appreciative of those who support poets and their poems by paying contest entry and submissions fees.

Contest Judge:

Queer poet and writer Cass Donish was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. They are the author of the poetry collection Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024).

Donish's two previous collections are The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was chosen by Maggie Nelson as winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition.

An interdisciplinary writer, educator, editor, and performer, Donish has writing appearing or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Poem-a-Day, Texas Review, Tupelo Quarterly, VICE, and elsewhere. A founding editor of The Spectacle, Donish earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where they received an Olin Fellowship and served as the Junior Fellow in Poetry.

With an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, Donish has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Missouri, Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, and Ashland University's low-residency MFA program. Their current writing explores grief, queer love, suicide loss, ecology, and young widowhood. They live in Columbia, Missouri with their partner and four cats.

Donish's work was formerly being published under the name Cassie Donish.

Last year’s winning poem:

“Harvest Syntax” by Bevin O’Connor

Judge: Ama Codjoe

2022’s winning poem:

“This is Not the Mouth” by Claressinka Anderson

Judge: Traci Brimhall

2021’s winning poem:

“In a Polish Dream” by Leah Graham

Judge: John Gallaher

2020’s winning poem:

“Every day I draw a different bird” by Megan Merchant