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 2022 and were chosen from our anthology Arriving at a Shoreline and Mario José Pagán Morales’ solo poetry collection Receta.
Congratulations to all our nominees and good luck! It was so difficult picking six from the sixty-five hugely talented writers we have published this year.
From Arriving at a Shoreline:
Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington - Eggs
Robert Anthony Gibbons - A Self-Taught Genius
Richard Loranger - Shed
Violeta Orozco - Seashell Harvest
Monty Rozema - Apple
From Receta:
Mario José Pagán Morales - Origin Story / Títeres Run the Sky
Want a taster? Here are the first few lines...
“Once I ordered poached eggs for breakfast at New York’s Malibu
Diner and they gave me two eggs in a cup with no toast. I ate
them with a fork, dangling bits of undercooked white.
Once you stole my egg prose poem. You abseiled it over a coffee
cup and won a prize for it.”
“birds got to have somewhere to roost, no wonder grandpa collected all those truck tires,
full of rain water and lizards, pieces of hood from an old chevrolet, an old green awning,
far to the back near his tool shed, had not used it in years, someone said it is dead back
there, or maybe it was just a yard show of lead pipes and broken down machines.”
“About a week ago, I woke to find feathers scattered here and there in my apartment. They were of light gray and brown coloring, and not very big, though certainly not from a tiny creature. Bemused, I went about picking them up, then realized that there were more than I’d first noticed, and grabbed the vacuum, hoping they wouldn’t clog it. They didn’t, but they did clog my attention for a while, wondering where the hell they came from. It seemed as if a bird had gotten in, but search as I might, there was no sign of anything more than feathers.”
“You turn them around
to see their perfectly creased backs
your shirt bulging with seashells—
cowries, conchs, cockles, sea urchin domes
whitened by the glaring sand.”
“Hilarity is very, very close to the hard red sensation of being in a lot of pain.
Apple is named after something hard-red, but also something unequivocally cottage-core, an object that is inanimate and still, connotated with vulvas, but also testicles, but also sharp cider and Adam and Eve and American baseball and poison.
They are not funny so much as they are very angry and very good at forming sentences. They perform in queer bars full of queer people, who are no less mean than not-queer people, but quite possibly meaner. But these people understand Apple, so there is no alternative. Apple is not so funny in the world outside the club, it seems, as they are incompatible with normal life, like a hard-red square peg fighting a soft-blue round hole.”
“A títere descends from heaven
still high
wings tucked into sheep skin
crisp midnight chucks
fresh Yankee de medio lao”
We are accepting poetry and prose submissions for our next anthology until January 15, 2023. Be sure to check out all our books. We look forward to reading your work.