Midwest Chapbook Series Winner Announcement

Midwest Chapbook Series Winner Announcement

Dana Levin has selected Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s manuscript Whither Weather for publication in the Midwest Chapbook Series. The chapbook will be available (crossed fingers) in time for AWP, and Elizabeth Clark Wessel will have a reading in Missouri next fall, along with Dana Levin.

Dana Levin chose Jeanne Stauffer-Merle’s manuscript, Here in the Ice House, as the runner-up.

Thank you to all who entered. And to Dana Levin. Thank you all, as well, for your patience, as the process took a couple months longer than expected this year.

Here is a lovely poem of Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s that will be in Whither Weather that was first published at FAWLT:

http://www.fawltmag.com/three/index.html


Love Poem at Thirty


I want to split open some sleek animal,
zip myself inside, and gallop away.
But I’m afraid I’d be galloping towards you.

Is the house still on fire?
I want to save you and save myself,
but in what order, like the oxygen masks
on airplanes, forget who needs one first
and you both die.

Nothing new happened today.
I took a train, and I can’t remember
one thing I thought about.
Times Sq and I passed by each other
and said hello, hello, hello.
Strangers did their best
not to touch.

And the sun, my god, the sun.
Spring is a sledgehammer.
Spring is like every clock ringing
and every bell striking at the same time.

Love, I don’t mean half of what I say.
Love, I’m not as bright as this day, but I am longer.
Love, what was it I said, remind me again,
I think we were someplace impossible,
and I said something, and you said
you’d remind me, but you never did.


More of her work can be found here:

http://sixthfinch.com/wessel1.html

Elizabeth Clark Wessel's poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, A Public Space, Fairy Tale Review, No, Dear, Sixth Finch, Asymptote, Lana Turner Journal, and Fawlt Magazine, among others. Her criticism can be found at Poetry International, The New Yorker's Book Bench blog, and BOMB Magazine's blog. She lives in Brooklyn and is an editor at Argos Books.

Argos Books:

http://argosbooks.org/