Chapbooks

Natalie Peeterse’s Black Birds : Blue Horse is remarkable for its urgency and power. This precisely envisioned elegiac sequence is both intimate and public, reckoning its speaker’s passage through both the urban landscape of Washington, D. C. and the distant wartime nightmare of Afghanistan. We live in an age that is corrosive in its details, and this superb chapbook reminds us of the raw weather we all now live within — and of the ways the world, at times, can simply collapse upon us.

– David St. John, judge

Natalie Peeterse has an MFA from the University of Montana.  Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Sonora Review and Strange Machine, among other journals. Her poems have appeared in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press) and other anthologies. She has been a fellow with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and was most recently an artist in residence at the Caldera Institute in central Oregon. She lives in Missoula, MT with her family.

Jay Shearer’s writing has appeared in multiple publications, including Other Voices, Beloit Fiction Journal, Main Street Rag, Southeast Review, and Southern Indiana Review. He currently teaches at Purdue Calumet and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.

“We’ll leave behind a language, travel back”, says Heather Aimee O’Neill in a poem from “Memory Future”,  locating the ghost of Jeanette Winterson’s “..memory past, memory future” precisely in these lyrical remembrances of what has not yet come full circle.  The trajectory forward into memory is the path of the imagination — these fiercely delicate poems prove what we already knew: that remembering and imagining are one.”

— Carol Muske-Dukes, judge

Heather Aimee O’Neill teaches creative writing at CUNY Hunter College of New York and is the Assistant Director of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She writes a book column, Across the Page, for MTV’s AfterEllen.com and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their son.

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