2018 Chapbook Contest Winner!

Congratulations to the 2018 Split Rock Review poetry chapbook winner Jen Karetnick for her manuscript The Crossing Over, which explores migrant experiences in the Mediterranean that are told from the boat's point of view. The Crossing Over will be available in early 2019 via Amazon, independent booksellers, and Split Rock Review's online store. 

Jen Karetnick is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize, and four poetry chapbooks. The winner of the 2017 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2016 Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cutthroat, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily, among many other publications. Jen is the co-editor of  SWWIM Every Day, a daily online literary journal. She works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts Charter School; the dining critic for MIAMI Magazine; a freelance lifestyle journalist; and a cookbook and guidebook author. Jen received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. You can find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik.

We would also like to recognize the strong collections submitted by the finalists and semi-finalists, listed in alphabetical order: 

FINALISTS

• Thirteen Moons by Robert Carney
• From the Dictionary of Geological Terms by Jolie B Kaytes
• Easy Street by Cindy King
• Salt, Rock, Spine by Abby Murray
• Beautiful Water by Sara Shearer
• Endangered Animals by Elizabeth Vignali

SEMI-FINALISTS

• Forty-Six Degrees North by Milton Bates
• This Document Should Be Retained as Evidence of Your Journey by Colleen Coyne
• Sewn from Water by Deborah Rosch Eifert
• Riverside Song by CJ Giroux
• In Knots by Jacob Hall
• Ten Minutes North by Hope Jordan
• The Replaceable by Toshiaki Komura
• Dark Matter by Martha McCollough
• To Where Are We Bound by Benjamin Mueller
• River Carry Me by Robert Okaji

Many thanks to all the writers that submitted to the 2018 Split Rock Review Poetry Chapbook Contest. We received over 100 manuscripts this year, and it was a very difficult decision due to the high quality of submissions. Thank you for your continued support and interest in Split Rock Review!

PHOTIC ZONE: AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK B. BEDELL

We're kicking off August with another installment of Photic Zone, featuring poet Jack B. Bedell!

The Photic Zone interview series spotlights Split Rock Review contributors to gain insight on their creative work, their sense of place and practice, and the small wonders that bring them joy. It is curated by Michelle Menting. 

Contributor Spotlight: Jenny Godwin

Jenny Godwin on "Promise Me Water"

My poem "Promise Me Water" featured in Issue 10 of Split Rock Review came to me at the peak of California’s drought. I write this essay on a plane leaving my now-home in Colorado to visit the town I wrote this poem in, Nevada City. It’s a much wetter world there in Northern California this Spring, no phantom gullies missing their waterfalls or wildflowers struggling to drink enough to bloom.

I wrote an enormous number of poems involving water during the three years I lived in California. It was instinctual, and maybe my own sort of water dance. Though I don’t consider myself religious, the feeling of rain cascading down after months of drought was truly the closest thing to holy I’ve ever felt. And that pull I experienced to water bodies during those months of intense drought felt spiritual. 

"Promise Me Water" arrived in pieces a few years ago as I sat by my former city’s trinity of river channels, the three forks of the mighty Yuba. I wanted an assurance these stream beds would fill up once again. The grass practically crackled that summer and the threat of fire was never far from us. When the water did finally come, I felt my body cracked open like a nut, and I literally did dance in the rain with friends. It was a technicolor experience. 

Now a Coloradan, deep in our own intense drought, my thoughts keep returning back to summer days spent on the Yuba, hoping for rain, watching how the river roared once fed.

Contributor Spotlight: Rosemarie Dombrowski

On Helium, Carbon, Nitrogen, and the Quirks of a Quirky Poet

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.

—Dianne Ackerman, from “Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)”

“Helium,” “Carbon,” & “Nitrogen” are micro-poems from a twenty-poem sequence entitled Corpus Callosum, which is the name given to the thick band of nerve fibers that divides (and connects) the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and more importantly, allows for communication between them. I thought this was the perfect title for a series of poems based on the first twenty elements, poems dedicated to exploring the intersections of hard science, human narrative, and our emotional responses to each. Thus, the poems are not merely based on the scientific properties of the elements, but the history behind their discoveries/discoverers, as well as my own experiential reference points and contexts for understanding.  

I’m not exactly a science geek, but I love the geological, biological, and medical sciences. It’s rare for me to not be straddling at least one of those spheres alongside the personal. My son, who has non-verbal Autism, has been the focus of much of my work, as well as the geology and geography of the Southwest, in addition to anything ornithological (dead or alive, two-dimensional or three). But given that science isn’t my first language, I tend to gravitate toward the narratives of minerology and neurology. In those vast expanses of foreign terminology, I find the language of poetry, which is also the language of discovery—of discovering proofs and theories, subjective and universal truths, intersections of logos and pathos, contact zones between the indigenous and the imaginary landscapes of the self. 

If I had to classify myself, I’d say I’m a confessionalist with a quirky scientific bent, which might just make me quirky. I’m rarely witty or funny in verse—I save my humor for my fiction. I suppose my fervent belief in “poetic education and access for everyone” has also led me to explore and tout the benefits that come from regular and creative commingling of the sciences and the arts. Poetry is a form of processing, of personalizing the universal and spitting it back out again as a newly hybridized product. What could be more important for us to practice (and celebrate) in the 21st century than the hybridization of form, which is comparable to the multi-modal nature by which we transmit all other types of information? If news and entertainment can be blended so effectively, why not science and art? Perhaps the latter is the only thing we should be striving for.