Series Editor Jennifer Barber is delighted to announce that Judge Sandra Lim has selected chigger ridge by Nicole Callihan of Miami, Florida, as the winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize.
Says Lim, “The poems in chigger ridge sound out the rich ambivalence in the poet’s senses of what makes up a self and its endless enmeshments with the material world. There are country matters here, pastoral concerns woven into impressions of place, family, and the dramas of love and becoming.”
Matt Donovan says, “The poems in Nicole Callihan’s exhilarating chigger ridge move in revved-up staccato bursts, each one straining against its brevity with the energy of a wasp battering a jam jar’s glass. These poems push against the conventions of language, commingling the colloquial with scraps from the literary canon and sifting obsessively through shards of memory as they grapple toward a truth ‘as plain and massive as the sky.’”
Nicole Cooley calls the book an “investigation of the ‘dark places’ of both body and landscape. A close look at Southern girlhood and a landscape of mountains, mined, stripped, empty. An investigation of bodies and violence…a brilliant excavation of landscape, language, and escape.”
The Tenth Gate Prize is awarded annually to a mid-career poet whose work is distinguished by sustained dedication to developing a unique poetics. Founded by Leslie McGrath in 2014, the prize honors the work of Jane Hirshfield. Poets with two or more full-length collections in print are eligible to submit entries every June 1-July 15. A new judge serves each year.
Nicole Callihan’s books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), SuperLoop (Sock Monkey 2014), and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples.
Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. She has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. SLIP, which won an Alma Award, will be published by Saturnalia in Spring 2025.
Publication is anticipated for June 2024.