Hadara Bar-Nadav - Show Me Yours

We here at The Laurel Review are pleased to announce that the judge of this year’s Midwest Chapbook Series, Martha Collins, has chosen, Hadara Bar-Nadav’s chapbook Show Me Yours, as this year’s winner. Here's a section from one of the poems from the chapbook:

From “Night, White, and Gold for Louise Nevelson”
6. Assemblage with Night


I’ll make room for you in my bed. Bed of maple, oak, ash, or my sweet favorite cherry. I kneeled in the dust, smelled it on his clothes. My father owned a lumberyard, which means wood was home. Familiar, though I plunged each piece into paint—black, white, and gold—to unhinge the familiar, anonymously at home. Later there was aluminum and steel. Whole monuments storeys and stories high. High stories, stacking one story on another. Each box with letters inside. I turned to Lucite, epoxy, and glass to be closer to the light. I wore silver armor around my neck and walked through the day thinner than light. Darling, I was disappearing. Wind passed through the thin room of me. A tumor inside the room of my mind. So light and thin I could feel my skull lifting at the seams. At last my mind released me. The boxes watched.

A wall full of stories. A wall like a letterpress, like letters being set. Leading like leather and setting. Kerning like kernel and keening. A wall to lean on, simple as hope. Either you would stay there or cut your throat. Such mercy inside shadow and form. Each box, a loving alphabet of its own. Each wall, an assembly of letters left behind. Discarded, I found them on the streets at night.

Look at time and it passes. Like a twitch. In the end, even fabric and paper were knit. The pieces, ready-made and willing to hinge. Assemblage, montage, collage, architectural debris, detritus, free, found on the street, offal, piecemeal, a meal in pieces but a meal nevertheless. Piecing is feminine. I saved each piece to hinge and knit. I gathered each and myself into the landscape. Salvaged a doorknob and a day.


The finalists were:


Jason Bredle, The Book of Evil
Jerry Harp, Creature Confidential
Megan Kaminski, Favored Daughter
Amanda McGuire, The Round of It
Trey Moody, The Quiet Room
Chad Parmenter, His Negatives of Leaves
Adam Peterson, The Flasher
Carter Smith, White Sky
Sathya Sridharan, A Practical and Detailed Account of How to Play Hamlet


A word about the contest: The entries are read blind by the editors of The Laurel Review, and then sent to the outside judge. Because of the regional focus of the chapbook series, and the relatively small pool of chapbooks (this year there was under 150) it is inevitable that several of the finalists will have some connection to the editors of The Laurel Review. (I know Hadara Bar-Nadav and Chad Parmenter quite well, for example. As well, we’ve published some of the finalists in The Laurel Review in the past.)