great weather for MEDIA is delighted to announce our nominations for the next Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses Series.
These nominations are for work published in 2021 and were chosen from our anthology Paper Teller Diorama.
Congratulations to all our nominees and good luck! It was so difficult picking six from the sixty-seven hugely talented writers we have published this year.
Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones - Scott's Not Here
Tongo Eisen-Martin - Newly Arranged Appetite
Rosalind Goldsmith - The Fret
Anthony Morales - Beyond Beyond
Robert L. Shuster - The Toy
Alan Semerdjian - The Hole in the Night
Want a taster? Here are the first few lines...
“When Scott isn’t ripping off my bodice in a burning fit, he’s chopping up McConnell’s jowls for a two thousand–dollar salad.
When Scott isn’t driving 1,800 miles to Brooklyn to run his fingers through my hair, he’s starting the Denver chapter of Neighbors in Action in nothing but Carhartt overalls.”
— Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones, "Scott's Not Here"
*
“Field of grass on the radiator
when you played
rhythming razors
hand pulled into an american institutionalization
dragging a century across a tobacco leaf
Making the mountain of painkillers a secondary definition
but money is green?”
— Tongo Eisen-Martin, "Newly Arranged Appetite"
*
“The fret had a fight with her—had her nerves in its fists. They were at the ko. It was now the horror of awkward shapes, of certain numbers that appeared to be wrong. It was the dread of losing an umbrella, a sock. The fear of someone’s back turning on her, against her—the disdain, the scorn. It was the anxiety of scissors opening and nothing to cut. The terror of being alone with impossible thoughts. Why did Monica send a picture of a giraffe? What does it mean, a giraffe, does it have some meaning she doesn’t know about? It is dread of kk instead of ok, the meaning there obscure and malign. Monica.”
— Rosalind Goldsmith, "The Fret"
*
“Did you know at the center of every galaxy is a massive blackhole & no one can survive in that middle, there is no gravity or light or love or whatever you need to survive the limits of death is called event horizon & on the other side to escape you have to run faster than the speed of light & although scientists say that’s impossible, didn’t God create heaven & hell & everything in between, so then if you are ever trapped, no you not, because all you have to do is—close eyes & expand at the speed of the universe stretching further than we imagine...”
— Anthony Morales, "Beyond Beyond"
*
“The diagnosis didn’t come to him with the shock, say, of a knife to his back, but arrived more like an hours-late Amtrak regional delivering a distasteful relative. That’s how he described the news to Fran, explaining in a text that it had only been a matter of time before his genetic legacy (cardiac trouble) caught up with him. But the fix, he assured her, was a routine procedure, a couple of days in the hospital at most, and he promised Fran he would not even miss their next monthly “assignation.” It was a word they both liked to use for its evocation of nineteenth century intrigue, of lovers in horse-drawn carriages rushing toward one another over a darkened countryside. Their full names, too, Edward and Francesca, suggested the era, and sometimes, deepening the dream, they mimicked the costume-drama language heard on PBS with “My dear” and “God willing” and “if only.””
— Robert L. Shuster, "The Toy"
*
“My father had a hole in the night
into which he would walk
and disappear for a few hours.
I mostly knew where he was
so it wasn’t the space that drew
me in but the idea of it, like a door
in a part of the mind pushed open,
every night like clockwork without
any need of repair, for years.”
— Alan Semerdjian, "The Hole in the Night"
Remember, we are accepting poetry and prose submissions for our next anthology until January 15, 2022. Be sure to check out all our books. We look forward to reading your work.