The Tenth Gate Prize, given to a mid-career poet writing in English, has been awarded to Jen Richter of Oregon for her poetry collection Dear Future.
The book was chosen from the summer 2022 submissions by judge Felicia Zamora, who says:
In Dear Future, we see the everyday quaked open to expose the seams of life’s uncertainty. Each poem becomes its own magnitude of scale—its own pulsating seismologic wave of language—that breaks loose for us to experience. These poems slide on a tightrope of moments compounded by imagery, ideation, and a slickness of language to portal us through space and time. With breath weaving ultimate control over many of these deliciously unpunctuated poems, we feel a building toward the interrogation of language, motherhood, and the covenants of “natural disaster or lasting love.”
Diane Seuss adds:
Dear Future teems with the cadence of panic, with the anticipatory anxiety of mothering children who are growing toward departure, and departing, while navigating a global pandemic, a globe rattled by literal and figurative earthquakes. Charles Francis Richter—he of the Richter scale, and a poet—becomes a comrade in namesake Jennifer Richter’s own harrowing attempts to accompany her son as he navigates a serious, persistent depression. Her formal expressiveness is vast, offering up unpunctuated, breathless free verse, a cento, an erasure, ekphrasis, and the sonnet. In this vastly human, deeply honest collection, Richter revels in enjambments that jolt us like an earthquake, like love.
The book will be released this June, available from The Word Works, Small Press Distribution, Ingram, and various online booksellers.
Jennifer Richter’s first collection Threshold was chosen by Natasha Trethewey as a winner in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; Richter’s second collection, No Acute Distress, was a Crab Orchard Editor’s Selection, and both were named Oregon Book Award Finalists. Her recent work has been featured in ZYZZYVA, The Account, The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, and CALYX. Richter teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program.
If you are a poet (writing in English) with two or more books in print and a new glowing manuscript of 48-80 pages in your hand, submit it to the Tenth Gate Prize by July 15. The prize of publication in 2024 and $1000 could be yours.
The judge is new every year, and in 2023 will be Sandra Lin. Our new Series Editor Jennifer Barber will see you safely through the process!