Monday, March 25, 2024

An interview with Bacopa 2023 Fiction Prizewinner Lisa Isaac

By Bacopa Literary Review Fiction Editor Alec Kissoondyal

Lisa Isaac's short story "In the Red" brought me along for a character-driven ride filled with humor and heartbreak. Isaac's story follows the protagonist's day of misadventure with her strange new employer, Leslie, weaving together lighthearted moments, day-to-day anxieties, and existential melancholy to create a rich tapestry of the human condition. In the following interview with Isaac, we discuss the inspiration behind her character, Leslie, her writing process, and her upcoming projects.

Leslie is such a complex and captivatingly strange character. How did you come up with him?

Once upon a time, I met someone like Leslie. Because I didn’t understand him, I made up a backstory complete with past failed relationships to try to solve the problem: why would someone act this way?

An element of the story that captured me was how, despite only getting glimpses into both characters’ lives, there is a perfect amount of detail to make them feel real. Did you have a process for deciding what details to include and what to omit?

Mostly, writing is editing for me. Like a whittler with a wooden block, the more details I cut away from an original draft, the clearer I see the faces in a story. Character details only make it to the last draft if they propel the story forward. 

Are there any projects you are currently working on/forthcoming publications that you want to mention?

I have many pots boiling on the stove, but right now I’m mostly attending to an interwoven collection of flash nonfiction. 

About the contributor: Lisa Isaac writes from her lakeside central Florida cottage where she lives with her wife and a smattering of entitled pets.  Between working and writing, she tends a wild but flower-full garden. She studied fiction at Florida State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

A meditation on Matthew J. Spireng’s “Two-faced Abecedarian”

By Bacopa Literary Review 2023 Poetry Co-Editor Reinfred Addo

The abecedarian form is one of those poetry forms that doesn’t always get its fair praise. People love haiku for its tendency to awaken all senses in just a few lines of verse. People love sonnets for the drama inherent in a volta. Other forms also get their fair share of admirers due to the unique twist they add to the exercise of complexity. The abecedarian, in contrast, seems so simple and elementary that poets tend to move past it once we consider ourselves to be “real”, “serious” and “good” poets. Yet, it’s within this deceptive simplicity that, to me, the abecedarian has honor. I dare anybody, from a novice writer to a seasoned Poet, to write a poem whereby each line starts with the letters of the alphabet (line #1 starts with A, line #2 starts with B, etc.) without making the final product read like a bad remix of “A for Apple, B for boy, C for cat…”. It’s hard as hell, ain’t it? Yet, it’s in this challenge that Matthew J. Spireng’s piece, “Two-faced Abecedarian Poem”, thrives. The content, which tells a tale of lying, mimics the form itself. “Arrive in a new town up north and people you meet may quiz/but you don’t have to tell the truth.” Simple, just lie about your past. However, as the voice in the poem continues, the simple becomes complicated.

...Soon it will seem

old hat, lying like that. But be careful

playing the game. A quick

question could trip you up. Like did you meet a certain Raj

running some northern state in India? I

sure wouldn’t envy you if you answered wrong. You might wish

to crawl in a hole, getting

unveiled like that.

To me, an abecedarian takes serious craftsmanship because, more so than a lot of other forms, every single line of an abecedarian has to be solid on its own in order for the whole poem to also get praise. An average or bad line is not able to easily hide amongst the well-crafted ones; it will most often stick out unpleasantly. Also, some forms tend to be more forgiving to what I call “the mushy middle”, whereby the middle of the poem is not quite as resounding as the beginning and/or end. Yet, so long as the beginning and end have weight, the poem will generally compensate for the mushy middle’s shortcomings. Not so for the abecedarian, any part that does not stand on its own will sour the whole poem and take the reader out of the world the poem is trying to build.  Spireng is able to avoid weak lines in his poem, which takes some great deft. In this abecedarian, we soon find that navigating life from A to Z is anything but elementary, especially when there’s a secret to keep.

About the contributor: Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book Good Work was published in 2020 by Evening Street Press. An 11-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also author of the full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks.

Matthew J. Spireng was awarded with an Honorable Mention for Formal Poetry in our 2023 edition. 


Monday, March 11, 2024

Formal Poetry vs. Free Verse, a Practical Commentary

By 2024 Bacopa Poetry Co-Editor J. Nishida

All poetry has form.  


Edward Hirsch likens a poem’s form to a human’s body—a necessary physical incarnation of spirit.  But how does one go about finding the appropriate form for a particular poem?  Mary Oliver asserts, “I believe content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form.  Like everything living, it is a mystery.”


To address this mystery, let’s take a practical look at free verse vs. formal poetry.*


Free Verse


Mary Oliver reminds us that free verse poetry “is by no means exempted from the necessity of having a design.”  Ron Padget also warns that free verse does not mean a free-for-all:  “It means that every poet who writes in this form must work to create his or her own rules.”  


Both these experts emphasize free verse poetry’s lines—line lengths, line breaks, spacing between lines, repetition of lines. What do these choices achieve when a reader first sees the poem?  As the reader reads the poem?  Oliver speaks of repetition of patterns in syntax, patterns of stress or rhythm, how a poet can build up expectations and then either fulfill them or pull the rug from under the reader’s feet.  Each of these choices will vary in each free verse poem, but internally, they should have intent and logic.


Study brilliant free verse poems and ask yourself WHY-WHY-WHY?  Why does the poet establish specific patterns?  Why does the poet break them?


John Murillo recommends Lucille Clifton’s “miss rosie” for such an exercise.  Look at the line lengths, capitalization, repetitions…  WHY-WHY-WHY?  All of the poet’s choices do work.  All of your free verse choices should do work—they should guide the reader in your absence.


“So, free verse offers no excuse for sloppy writing,” Padget concludes.  “In fact, it demands more of the poet, because her or she must question every word, test the shape and sound of every line, and be able to defend the choices made.”


Formal Poetry


“Form is a straightjacket,” Justin Quinn proclaims, “in the way that a straightjacket was a straightjacket for Houdini.”  


Mark Strand & Eavan Boland open their Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by stating, “For many people what is off-putting about poetic form is the belief, sometimes based on an unlucky class or exam, that these are cold and arbitrary rules, imposed to close out readers rather than include them.”  They and Edward Hirsch, editor of the 700-page tome A Poet’s Glossary, beg to differ.


They explain that poetic forms around the world were developed and honed over generations by skilled artists to express diverse aspects of humanity—language, voice, music, culture, emotional needs, political and aesthetic movements—whether in concert with the establishment or in opposition to it.  The exploration of these forms can be a type of time travel, a way to experience the breadth of human communication and art.  Boland reminds us that poetic forms “are not abstract, but human,” stressing their diversity and multiplicity of their purposes.  They are not “imposed” rules, but something organic, “rooted,” which will “liberate and not constrain.”


But established forms do require study.  Stephen Dunn advises, “Think of learning [poetic forms] as acquiring the tools of your trade, which you may or may not choose to employ.  A carpenter doesn’t always use a drill, though it would be disastrous for him not to know it exists.”


Learn your tools, and then employ the appropriate tool for the appropriate task.  Want to capture a snapshot of a moment along with its insight?  A haiku might be the right tool.  Want the poignancy of a haiku, but with a little more room for commentary?  Try a waka/tanka.  Perhaps you need to drive home a sense of inescapable repetition, or explore how repeated elements intertwine and interrelate.  Have you studied the pantoum?  Wish to juxtapose a diversity of concise images and experiences loosely linked by a repeated rhyme or word or refrain?  The answer could be a ghazal.


Whichever form you use, it should support and enrich the content of your poem.  If you are forcing words or rhymes or rhythms in boxes they simply don’t fit, consider a different form.


There are innumerable resources on poetic forms available to teach you the tools of your trade—websites, books, YouTube videos.  I recommend studying multiple sources when researching a form, as well as reading numerous (diverse) examples.  If you wish to learn about a form from a culture not your own, try to include commentaries and examples from that culture.


Formal poetry need not be limiting.  Hirsch reminds us that “the devices work the magic in poetry.”  Explore that magic.


Innovation and Subversion of Established Forms


In his Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney states, “In any movement towards liberation, it will be necessary to deny the normative authority of the dominant language or literary tradition.”  


Poets have always subverted, converted, played with, and innovated forms—none so much as contemporary American poets.  While it is natural for poets from historically marginalized cultures to reject the “canonical” forms of the cultures who oppress them, many, such as Carl Phillips, argue that claiming and/or changing a form “is how to make it one’s own…  I’m using what’s been handed down to me, but to my own purposes…a conversation that insists on the inclusion of my language…my refusal to be invisible…”


In the recent renaissance of formal poetry, anti-establishment poets are leading the charge.  Patricia Smith, who famously began her career winning poetry slams with her spoken word masterpieces, also publishes poems that “include, but are not limited to the dramatic monologue, the political elegy, the sonnet, the ghazal, the golden shovel…” (Terrance Hayes).  Her brilliant 2021 crown of sonnets, “Nap Unleashed,” is a tour de force of the form.


Terrance Hayes, the creator of the golden shovel form as well as forms involving such devices as anagrams, has famously reshaped the traditional sonnet, replacing “conventional rhyme schemes with much denser sonic arrangements, often untethered line ends [and] midline rhymes….  He’s also inverting traditional stories about power and tragedy in the making of lyric poems” (Stephanie Burt).


The sonnet form seems to invite innovation.  Lisa L. Moore states, “The form invites complexity and contradiction because ‘sonnets can think.’  This is precisely [what gives] the sonnet its political force.”  Phillips discusses how the “restless” form of the sonnet with its ever-shifting rhymes, its volta, the rebellious little couplet, invites revolution.


Look up Jericho Brown’s sonnet “Independence” (and/or Nate Marshall’s “African American Literature” if you can’t handle strong language).  Examine how they both use and subvert the traditional form to startling effect.


If your poem’s content demands tension, contradiction, reversals, subversion, deconstruction, innovation, taking and making a traditional form your own might be the answer.  But, again, be sure your choices guide or challenge your reader with intent.


Final Thoughts 


Whether you choose to write/submit formal poetry or free verse, be sure the content of your work is in genuine conversation with its form.  And be sure the content of your poem is poetry.  


As Lucille Clifton reminds us, “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.”  A poem should be a journey, an exploration, often with unexpected (if not for the author, at least for the reader) shifts and turns.  The volta of a sonnet, the twist in a haiku or sijo…  The unexpected juxtaposition of images, the multiple-reading created by a clever line break…   The best poetry is free of cliché and predictability.  And free of mere self-focus.


If you wish to preach (unless, perhaps, it is preaching to power), write a sermon.  If you wish to tell a simple story, write a simple narrative.  “A poem means itself.  You create something, rather than define it” (Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill).  As Andrew Johnson rather poetically explains, “The poem is both the winding road and the wild horse that gallops past us as we read, so that when we come around the last bend, there it is, waiting for our shock of recognition.”


Above all, revise your poems until each word and punctuation mark and space and break and choice does the work it needs to do, serving the content.  “Poetry is…speech in which the words come in an order which could not be changed without ruining the verity and power of the whole,” according to Robert Nye.


“Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” 

—James Tate


*For thoughts on Bacopa’s other poetry category, see my co-editor Oliver Keyhani’s excellent blog post, “Visual Poetry:  A Dynamic Interplay.”



Resources:


  • The American Sonnet, Dora Malech & Laura T. Smith, eds.

  • The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations, ed. Dennis O’Driscoll

  • “The End of the Line:  Terrance Hayes and Formal Innovation” (Kenyon Review, 12/22/2016)

  • Handbook of Poetic Forms, ed. Ron Padgett

  • The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Mark Strand & Eavan Boland

  • A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

  • A Poet’s Glossary, by Edward Hirsch

  • “The Politics and Play of Terrance Hayes” by Dan Chiasson (New Yorker, 7/2/18)

  • The Redress of Poetry, by Seamus Heaney

  • Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, W. N. Herbert & Matthew Hollis, eds.

  • Watch Your Language, by Terrance Hayes

  • “Voluntary Imprisonment” by Stephanie Burt (Slate, 5/28/19)

Monday, March 4, 2024

A meditation on Martins Deep’s “how to sing in an electric chair”

By Bacopa Literary Review 2023 Poetry Co-Editor Reinfred Addo

In the 2023 edition of Bacopa Literary Review, the poem that received an honorable mention in the free-verse poetry category was “how to sing in an electric chair” by Martins Deep. This poem felt to me as a sort of vignette, a moment in time, of George Stinney. George Stinney was a 14-year-old African-American boy who, in 1944, was executed by electric chair for the murders of two white girls in Alcolu, South Carolina. It was later determined that Stinney was wrongly convicted, especially considering the courthouse was made up of a cast of an all-white jury and judge. Even the attendees were all white as African-Americans were barred from entering the courthouse during the trial proceedings. In his poem, Martins Deep paints a heartrendingly vivid picture, using a semi-omniscient, semi-personal voice, to narrate the passage from life to death of a boy being executed in an electric chair. The voice views George Stinney’s moment of dying as a vision whereby Stinney is going through the act of joining the atmosphere and his ancestors. Perhaps, this voice is Stinney’s spirit itself, using the word “you” to refer to itself.

somewhere in this vision, you’re swallowing an anther, for the pollen it’ll bear

in your throat, so that whenever you sigh, you become airborne:


black boy, light as pollen grain. black boy carried in his own breath,

slipping through the fingers of time.

--

in this vision, you’re leaping off the edge of a bible to the railway track

in alcolu that leads straight into your mother’s bosom

A number of poems have been written of African-Americans being murdered for crimes they didn’t commit (“Silhouette” by Langston Hughes and “Afterimages” by Audre Lorde are examples that immediately come to mind). What makes Deep’s unique is that the author himself is from and lives in Nigeria, half a world away from the location in which the poem is set. This, however, does not make Deep’s poem any less powerful. See, there is a collective trauma that is felt across the Black diaspora and across generations, however spread around the world Black people are. In some ways it’s spiritual, thus, it’s not too far fetched to imagine that the spirits of Black ancestors who suffered under white supremacy and slavery moved upon Martins Deep to allow him to write this poem of his spiritual distant relative George Stinney. In a way, it makes the past the present and transports the reader into that execution chamber in 1944. Martins Deep’s poem is so powerful that it morphs the room of the reader into an execution chamber to reveal a black boy singing his own elegy, a song of innocence, as electricity passes through him. This electricity is so powerful that, for however long the poem lasts, it seems to jump from the page. It seems to bounce off the walls. It seems to pass through George Stinney. And it seems to pass through the reader. 

About the contributor: Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet of Urhobo descent, a Taurus, photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He says hi @martinsdeep1.

Friday, March 1, 2024

Editor's Reflection on Visual Poetry 2023 Award Winners

By Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Co-Editor Oliver KeyhaniA close-up of a form

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Honorable mention: "1040A" - Sara Adams


In visual poetry, an image is created. In some instances, the image challenges the viewer in an uncertain manner. Maybe it is something familiar, something cultural, something that defines a key characteristic of our society, but altered, almost disturbing in a nearly unconscious manner. We know something is missing, and it can be that very missing space which reminds us of the fragile nature of individual identity in the amalgamation of our social contract.


What is more universal than death and taxes? But what if the taxes themselves were effaced? What if all the numbers: income, social security, withholdings—the numbers that define our transactional society, were removed, save one? Save the one that is us? This is what Sara Adams does in this deceptively simple rendering of the ubiquitous 1040A form. The visual impact seems impersonal, nothing to make the individual, a bureaucratic white space, save for the "1", the zeroes, and the final "1". The "1" that reminds us we are there.


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Visual Poetry Award Winner: "Snow" - CJ Sheu 


There are many diverse iterations of what constitutes visual poetry. In one aspect, actual discernable letters are used. However, these letters can move, mutate, rearrange themselves in ways that can direct and/or challenge the eye or gaze. No two letters, no two words, no two poems seem alike in CJ Sheu's "Snow". Like its referential title, the type seems to fall down the page, white on black, like a gentle snowstorm in the night. But the darkness brings with it some apprehension, as if something not quite perceived, not quite understood. When you look at the "snow" some disconcerting or disturbing voices are seen: "no", "no no", "on", "won", "now", "own". These emerge and fade back into the "snow". The visual nature cannot be ignored; the "w"s, the "o"s, the "n"s, and the "s"s all seem to lull the eye. The overall effect is surprising, a combination of calm and disorientation, an impressive accomplishment!


What do we look for in terms of visual poetry? The two award winners offer examples, but not limits for submission. Much in a basic way, is subjective. However, several points can be kept in mind. (1) If we have many submissions of one kind: for example, poems in the shape of an object, e.g., an animal, vegetable, etc., we are likely to only take one such visual poem-be unexpected. (2) We are limited regarding the size of the page and color can be problematic-those are some unfortunate limits, so please see if your visual poem would translate well and in enough detail in the format of the journal. (3) We are not just looking for interesting and appealing images, there must be some element of poetry—be able to define that in your mind and hopefully we will be able to see it too.


About the contributors:


Sara Adams’ chapbooks include Poems for Ivan (Porkbelly Press), Western Diseases (dancing girl press), Think Like a B (Trump erasure poems; SOd press; free to download!). and six Ghost City Press Summer Series Micro-chaps (also free to download). Check out more of Sara’s work, including chapbook links, at kartoshkaaaaa.com.


Chingshun J. Sheu is Assistant Professor of Applied English at Ming Chuan University in Taoyuan, Taiwan. He's also Taiwan's premier Anglophone film critic, indexed on Rotten Tomatoes as CJ Sheu. Tweet at him @cj_sheu.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Bacopa Literary Review 2024 Editorial Team

Editor in Chief J.N. Fishhawk is a poet and freelance writer. A founding co-host of the Civic Media Center’s open mic Thursday Night Poetry Jam, he is also the author of three chapbooks and Postcards from the Darklands, ekphrastic poems accompanying artwork by artist Jorge Ibanez. He is co-creating the ongoing World of Whim Sea children’s book series with illustrator Johnny Rocket Ibanez at fishhawkandrocket.com.


Managing Editor T. Walters is a poet, writer, and musician living among the orange trees. Their work appears in Nymeria Publishing’s Descendants of Medusa. Books, baking bread, and pulling needles through thread make up a significant portion of their life. They live to connect, create, and marvel at nature’s many wonders.


Poetry Co-Editor J. Nishida holds a BA, MA, and EdS, as well as a TESOL graduate certificate. She is active in the local poetry community as an organizer, teacher, editor, and performer, and is a co-host of the Thursday Night Poetry Jam at the Civic Media Center. She was Bacopa 2021’s Fiction Editor and will lead a poetry workshop for the 2024 Bard & Broadside North Central Florida Poetry Festival.


Fiction and Flash Fiction Editor Alec Kissoondyal is an undergraduate at the University of Florida pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English. His fiction has been published in Zephyr Literary Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, The Bookends Review, Roadrunner Review, Let’s Stab Caesar! Magazine, Retro Press Magazine, Drunk Monkeys Magazine, The Centifictionist, and The Los Angeles Review. He has a forthcoming short story to be released in Cornice Magazine.


Poetry Co-Editor Oliver Keyhani is a visual and performance artist, poet, and writer. He is a member of the Gainesville Fine Arts Association and a founding member of the Carousel of Souls Curiosities Circus Troupe (CoSCCT). His short experimental poem-play “Children of Gaia” has been produced at the Tank Theater in NYC. His hybrid visual-poetry works the “dada manuscripts”: thé avec dada and the book of dada dandies have received international acclaim, with forthcoming releases planned.


Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin studied English Literature and French at the University of Florida. She has published humor, short fiction, and personal memoir and spent over fifteen years as a freelance editor and teacher of languages.


Social Media Manager Mary Ansell, an outreach librarian by day, lives and creates in Gainesville, Florida. Her writing has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Whale Road Review, and Pithead Chapel. Find her literature recommendations on Instagram @once.and.future.reads.


Editor Emerita Mary Bast‘s creative nonfiction, poetry, and flash memoir have appeared in a number of print and online journals, and she’s author, co-author, or contributor to eight professional books from her career as a psychologist, leadership consultant, and Enneagram coach. Bast is also a visual artist.

Monday, February 12, 2024

An abstract, emotional piece wins the 2023 prize for Creative Nonfiction

By Bacopa Literary Review Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin

Above all else, when reading through entries for the creative nonfiction category, I am looking to be moved. What I love about this category is the ability it provides to see into some small part of another person’s life and feel connected.


"Sh'mot (Names) / Exodus (The Way Out)" by Hailee Nielsen moved me to tears. This piece was something of a departure from my usual taste. I tend toward the more straightforward and Nielsen’s writing is quite abstract. The seemingly disparate images throughout are welded together with words evoking either parched throat or flowing water.


We are all hopeful that later I will learn how to pry my own words from the back of my throat. Sundays: I turn over every translation and iteration of the Word like a soft stone in my hands, many voices preaching a single Truth. This is where I learn rote memorization. Twenty years later in medical school, I come to a body at a table in a hospital classroom, and I am already well-versed in versions of Bibles and bodies, brimming with steely reverence for the multiplicity of truth.


This short piece begins parched in the desert and ends deep in the water. The ending passage took my breath away.


When night comes, I am joined by other figures holding truths. I meet you here, as I stand in the river beneath constellations and infinity, pant legs rolled to the knee. I want to learn to swim, and you know how to swim. From you, a gift: myself, unbaptized, in an ocean with you, mouths open and eyes shut.


Like I was taught to pray.


About the contributor: Hailee Nielsen grew up in rural Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor with their two cats. Their work has previously appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, and in the 2020 Issue of Bacopa Literary Review.


You can read their story in the 2023 Edition of Bacopa Literary Review, where you can purchase at this link here.

Monday, February 5, 2024

2023 Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

By Editor-in-Chief J. N. Fishhawk

This is the introductory letter from the Editor-in-Chief that appeared in the 2023 edition of Bacopa Literary Review. If you would like to purchase this edition, it is available on Amazon in print or ebook and you can find it here.

As we assemble each edition of Bacopa Literary Review, we editors are always on the lookout for themes that show up in the pieces we accept. Partly, we do this for the wonder of it. There is a mix of both divination and transmutation that is part of the joy of making a journal, observing as through the process the many disparate parts are brought together into a kind of oneness to make a new thing. But we also watch for and share examples of repeating ideas and motifs as part of the process of organizing the journal’s contents. Sometimes you want two pieces with similar themes close together.  Other times, you want to make sure they’re far apart, separated from each other by thickets of unrelated, dissimilar words and ideas. 

One year, we discovered that the primary theme, across all genres, was birds. Over the last three years, many of the themes in our contributors’ work have revolved around the COVID pandemic and its attendant issues of physical and mental health and safety. This was especially true of our 2022 edition, in which a number of contributors responded to Poetry editors Reinfred Addo and Oliver Keyhani’s call for work addressing the impacts of the pandemic, and health issues in general, on communities of color. 


Imagery is often the easiest thread of commonality to pull out, both within and across genres. This year, many of our Visual Poetry selections coalesced around imagery involving circles, for example. Our Fiction Award and Honorable Mention stories both have titles and thematic aspects that feature the color red. The apparent antagonist of award winner “In the Red” by Lisa Isaac briefly glows ominously red in the narrator’s tail lights, but as its title suggests, the story is driven primarily by the metaphorical financial red of desperate poverty. Emilee Prado’s Honorable Mention piece “Red Yucca” gets its title from the film the protagonists end up as extras for, which in turn takes its name from the flower of the Arizona desert plant. But red also shows up as a visual emblem for the just-missed passion the two main characters share: As she moves away...her shoulder brushes the still-wet graffiti and it leaves a crimson mark on her faded yellow t-shirt. The young woman who, though only an extra in the film, may just get the chance to be a main character in a Missed Connections style romance wears a metaphorical heart on her sleeve. 


Emotional and social themes of other kinds are easy to find as well. In both Humor and Creative Nonfiction, editor Stephanie Seguin noted strong themes involving family connections of various types among this year’s contributions.  Family provides us with the first and most powerful of questions we social animals must ask, as portrayed with devastating acuity in Sue Hann’s Portrait and Punctum”: Who are you? Who are you to me? And, sometimes, being family together can provide us with the surprising comfort of answers, as the riverine adventure of “Spirals” by Kathryn Ganfield demonstrates: I thought it was me teaching them…But really, you see, it was my kids teaching me.


Some of these connections center the struggle and brokenness that family too often embroils us in. A number of this year’s contributors have expressed these issues through imagery and narrative devices involving an element that often brings even the most broken and divided of families together, for better or worse: food. Nonfiction “Junk/Food” by Kara Goughnour and Nancy Cook’s fictional “Pa’ella” pull no punches in facing the brokenness. Barbara Westwood Diehl’s prose poem “Menu After Cheating” takes a sly, wry tack, with food as metaphor, vehicle, and accompaniment. Mary Liza Hartong’s Humor Award-winning “Kringle” takes a gentler, if ironic, approach to the way food is woven into the ties that bind: You see, my mother and her brother don’t just share a nose, but a sense of certainty...They’re not haughty; they just know what’s good for you.


This year, one theme came all too easily. The ongoing push for more book bans, gag rules, and other restrictions on the free speech of writers, educators, and media workers here in Florida and around the United States moved us to put out a call for works that address the issue of censorship. 


The irony of backwards-facing attempts to limit people’s access to information—especially for students, the current and coming generations of whom are all “digital natives,” children of the internet age—in an allegedly-free society is not lost on us. As writers and editors working both in print and online, we felt moved to raise our voices against this retrograde tide, and encourage others to join us in doing so. Our contributors responded: you will find a number of pieces in Bacopa 2024 that address this growing concern. Though separating words from imagery and the piece as a whole does Visual Poetry a bit of a disservice, I’ll pull a few quotes from the text in Gray Williams’ sardonic piece “Strike Through" to say that we here at Bacopa do not take kindly to people in positions of power trying to tell writers, journalists, teachers, students, and others to be half of yourself…tie up your quirks and politics…make like a cat and fit in this box.


Perhaps the best retort to people who would seek to censor, ban, gag, and redact those they’ve been taught to fear into submission is the reverent joy of queer love as antidote and exit expressed in Hailee Nielsen’s enchanting spell of transformation, “Sh'mot (Names) /Exodus (the Way out)”:

I want to learn to swim, and you know how to swim. From you, a gift: myself, unbaptized, in an ocean with you, mouths open and eyes shut.

Like I was taught to pray.


There is so much more, reader. More to know, more to feel, more to be. We’ve pulled together a sample of some of it here for you. Welcome to Bacopa Literary Review 2023.

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Bacopa Literary Review 2023 Award Winners

 FICTION

AWARD: "In the Red" by Lisa Isaac

Lisa Isaac writes from her lakeside central Florida cottage where she lives with her wife and a smattering of entitled pets. Between working and writing, she tends a wild but flower-full garden. She studied fiction at Florida State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Red Yucca" by Emilee Prado

Emilee Prado is a fiction writer and essayist whose work appears in Cincinnati Review, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. Emilee was raised in a working-class family. She has lived in Asia and South America and currently resides in Tucson, Arizona. Find out more at emileepradoauthor.com or on social media: @_emilee_prado_. 

CREATIVE NONFICTION: 

AWARD: "Sh'mot (Names) / Exodus (The Way Out)" by Hailee Nielsen

Hailee Nielsen grew up in rural Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor with their two cats. Their work has previously appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, and in the 2020 Issue of Bacopa Literary Review.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Portrait and Punctum" by Sue Hann

Sue Hann's debut memoir in essays is forthcoming with Neem Tree Press. You can find her at suehannwrites.com and on Instagram @SueHannwrites.

HUMOR

AWARD: "Kringle" by Mary Liza Hartong

Mary Liza Hartong lives and writes in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. She's a Darmouth grad, a Fulbright Scholar, and a proud aunt. Her first novel is forthcoming from William Morrow in 2024.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Curly" by Roberta Anthes

Roberta J. Anthes is a retired college English teacher and track coach, but her most recent occupation has been caregiver to her elderly mom. She's had pieces published in The Southern California Review, Writer's Digest Show Us Your Shorts, and Women on Writing

FORMAL POETRY

AWARD: "Burning Haibun At the Creek" by Haley Winans

Haley Winans is a garden-lover and bunny mom from Annapolis, Maryland. She has poetry published in Slipstream, The Shore Poetry, and elsewhere. She's in the University of Memphis MFA Creative Writing program. She's a founding co-editor of Beaver Magazine. During undergrad, she studied Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, with a focus on environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, and poetry.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Two faced Abecedarian" by Matthew J. Spireng

Matthew J. Spireng's 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book Good Work was publishing in 2020 by Evening Street Press. An 11-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also author of the full-length poetry books What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks. 

FREE VERSE POETRY

AWARD: "st0p bl0cking the sun (car0usel)" by August Reynolds

August Reynolds is a triple English major at Virginia tech whose work has appeared in a wide variety of journals over the years. He currently resides in Blacksburg, VA and shares his home with two cute but quite dumb cats.

HONORABLE MENTION: "How to sing in the electric chair" by Martins Deep

Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet of Urhobo descent, a Taurus, photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He says hi @martinsdeep1.

VISUAL POETRY

AWARD: "Snow" by Chingshun J. Sheu

Chingshun J. Sheu is Assistant Professor of Applied English at Ming Chuan University in Taoyuan, Taiwan. He's also Taiwan's premier Anglophone film critic, indexed on Rotten Tomatoes at CJ Sheu. Tweet at him @cj_sheu.

HONORABLE MENTION: "1040A" by Sara Adams

Sara Adams' chapbooks include Poems for Ivan (Porkbelly Press), Western Diseases (dancing girl press), Think Like a B (Trump erasure poems; SOd press; free to download!), and six Ghost City Press Summer Series Micro-chaps (also free to download). Check out more of Sara's work, including chapbook links, at kartoshkaaaaa.com. 


~Thank you to everyone who submitted to this year's contest. Stay tuned for our upcoming journal release reading!~