THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE
OCTOBER 2020We are pleased to announce that Marcia L. Hurlow is runner-up for The Hopper Poetry Prize for her manuscript To All Appearances.
To All Appearances dwells with and within the natural world, from “a bird’s screech, so like a human / shiver” in “Blessing” to the “syllabary of chimney smoke” in “Suburban Sunset,” and more. There are such fresh and inventive turns of metaphor and image here, like the “back / vowels round as pillows” and how “the moon slides above the small leaf / of cloud.” So many pages bring a discovery, a moment to see the world as if for the first time.
—The Hopper Editors
Marcia L. Hurlow's first full-length collection of poetry, Anomie, won the Edges Prize. She also has five chapbooks. More than three hundred of her individual poems have appeared in literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago Review, River Styx, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, Stand, Cold Mountain, Zone 3, and The Journal, among others. Last year she received the Al Smith Fellowship for Poetry for the second time. She is vice president of the board of Whispering Prairie Press and senior poetry editor of Kansas City Voices. Enjoy a poem from To All Appearances below.
The Grace of Loss
In winter most of your body heat is lost
through the top of your head. If you wear a hat
made of a balloon, how long before you’ll rise
fueled by loss? And what else are you losing?
Say it’s July in Kentucky. That florid
humidity twists your hair into vines
crippled with knots, presses you to the trunk
of a pin oak. There, as you try to breathe
in the fickle shadows, the leaves of light
slap your sweating skin. You crave a breeze
like a long cold drink. What you have lost
is nothing—ephemeral as the dark
after a false dawn, before sunrise: starlings
sing, then lose the light, then sing again.