Bacopa Literary Review 2022 Award Winners

FICTION

AWARD: "An Act of Kindness" by Murzban F. Shroff

Murzban F. Shroff is a Mumbai-based writer. His fiction has appeared in 75 literary journals. He is the winner of the John Gilgun Fiction Award and has seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His short story collection, Breathless in Bombay, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books. His collection, Third Eye Rising, was featured on the Esquire list of Best Books of 2021. His novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize and will be published in the U.S. in Fall 2022.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Benny & Bjorn" by Lilia Snowfield Anderson

Lilia Snowfield Anderson was named after a great-great-uncle she never met. Bartending shifts consume her nights and her debut novel draft consumes her days. She lives in a small, Minnesota lake town. Her fiction can be found in The Marrs Field Journal, The Agapanthus Collective, Blood & Bourbon, and more.

 CREATIVE NONFICTION

AWARD: "Girl Sunplit" by Neethu Krishnan

Neethu Krishnan is a writer from Mumbai, India. She holds postgraduate degrees in English and Microbiology and writes between genres at the moment. Her work has appeared in The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Seaside Gothic and the anthology "Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging" (Volume Silver) from Improbable Press.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Waiting" by Miki Lentin

Miki Lentin completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, was a finalist in the 2020 Irish Novel Fair for Winter Sun, placed highly in competitions including Fish Publishing and Leicester Writers, and published in Litro, Storgy, Story Radio, and MIR, among others. Miki volunteers with the refugee charity Breaking Barriers and with foodkind in Greece, and dreams of one day running a café again.

HUMOR

AWARD: "How Busy I Was" by Marjorie Drake  

Marjorie Drake, after more than thirty years practicing law in Hartford, Connecticut, recently closed her practice to concentrate on her writing. Her work has appeared in Parhelion Literary Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Show and Tell to Remember" by Victoria Lynn Smith  

Victoria Lynn Smith writes short stories, essays, and articles. She has been published on Brevity Blog, Wisconsin Public Radio, Moving Lives Minnesota, Better Than Starbucks, 8142 Review, Red Cedar Review, Spring Thaw, Hive Literary Journal, Persimmon Tree, and Jenny. Read more at writingnearthelake.org. 

FORMAL POETRY

AWARD: "Amelia's Freckle Cream" by Shauna Osborn

Shauna Osborn is Executive Director of Puha Hubiya (an Indigenous arts nonprofit). Their poetry collection Arachnid Verve was a finalist for an Oklahoma Book Award. Other honors include a New Poets of Native Nations Scholarship, a Crescendo Poetry Fellowship, and a National Poetry Award from the New York Public Library

HONORABLE MENTION: "All love poems are horror poems when you are the creature" by R. Thursday

R. Thursday (they/them) is a writer, historian, educator, and all-around nerd. When not subverting middle school social studies curriculum, they can be found reading, playing video games, or writing about space, vampires, comic books, queerness, and on good days, all of the above.

FREE VERSE POETRY

AWARD: "Listen to Gala's mutterings" by Sylvia Anne Telfer

Sylvia Anne Telfer is an international award-winning Scottish poet/short story writer frequently published in anthologies and magazines, a qualified English teacher, and one of her jobs was In-House Publications Manager at the University of Hong Kong. She is a campaigner to halt climate change, a feminist, and an equal rights activist.

HONORABLE MENTION: "In the Name of the Name" by Sunyoung Kay

Sunyoung Kay is a poet located near St. Louis, Missouri who is just beginning the journey of revealing the stories held within.

VISUAL POETRY

AWARD: "A Change in Mood II" by Karla Van Vliet

Karla Van Vliet’s newest books are She Speaks in Tongues (Anhinga Press,) poems and asemic writings, and Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings (Shanti Arts.) She is a Forward Prize, three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee. Van Vliet is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal.

HONORABLE MENTION:"NEWS" by J. Nishida

J. Nishida is a Gainesville poet, writer, editor, tutor, sometimes teacher, and mom. She is one of the hosts of the Thursday Night Poetry Jam at the CMC. She enjoys travel and theatre; studying literature, linguistics, languages, mythology, and fairy tales; and annoying other poets with her experimental poetry.

 

 

Visual Poetry: A Dynamic Interplay

by Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Co-Editor Oliver Keyhani

Fig. 1. Typescract 63
Dom Sylvester Houedard,
1963, 20x12.5 cm

Visual poetry bends the script, the letter, the consonants, the vowels. It allows for a transition from oral tradition to written text to imagery of the written text. Modern visual poetry is as dynamic and diverse as any art form. It can, but does not have to push a dialogue (dialect?) between visual arts and literature, between representation and abstraction, between constructions and deconstructions. 

Visual poetry spans lettering, typography, handwriting, and collage. From the typestracts of Houedard and other typography (Figs. 1 & 2) to concrete poems and calligrams (Fig. 3) that recapitulate the shapes of objects and things, visual poetry allows for a dynamic interplay that connects the eyes and ears in the experience of poetry (click on images to enlarge).

Visual poetry also has a rich history of rebelliousness, whimsy, social commentary, and even scathing political exposure. As stated by Derek Beaulieu, "The libidinal excess typified in concrete poetry is not tied to a biological author, but rather to the excess and waste caused in the production by business machines of 'correct' and legible documents." (Beaulieu, The Last VISPO Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008, pg. 75).

Fig. 2. Calligram, Guillaume Appolinaire

Many visual poets chafe at "accepted conventions of Poetry," and seek to challenge and push boundaries of subject and object, form and function. The "distortion" of text into a visual aspect that cannot be separated from the text itself can be seen as an echo of the "conceptual structure of reality" espoused by Hegel. 

Fig. 3, Amanda Earl

If things exist for actualizing "a priori pure concepts," vis-ual poetry can provide poten-tially unantici-pated sources of "sense impressions" that seem to hint at but can unnervingly obscure underlying concepts of our social reality.

For additional information concerning visual poetry and examples see "Visual poetry: what it is and examples," "Visual Poetry Today," "The Vispo Bible: John," and "Guillaume Apollinaire." 

 

Metamorphic

by 2021 Prose Poetry contributor Claire Bateman

My writing tends to arise from several sources, all filtered and transformed through the chaotic creative process known as “combinatory play.”

First, there are my own obsessions. I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomenon of sleep, that altered state we enter collectively on a regular basis though each of us experiences it alone—how mystical, how paradoxical, how completely ordinary! And I’ve always loved gems and jewels; in an archetypal sense, they’re like dreams or dream—messages since they speak to us of the hidden world of caves, the underground, and the sea. Though such stones can be cut and shaped, bought and sold, there’s an irreducible otherness about them, an ineradicable feral quality I find compelling, so it made sense to me to link them with sleep. 

Another writing source is direct input from daily life, like the news item I saw last year about eco-wear featuring fashion boots made from mushrooms instead of leather; I suspect that this story lodged in my brain where it underwent the transformation that sparked the idea of clothing created from geological materials. And would I have written this piece if we weren’t in a pandemic, seeking a treatment/cure? I’m not sure. Certainly, though, from our own unfolding ecological disaster comes the subtly ominous undertone as the narrative touches on the ethically ambiguous extraction process that makes the insomnia treatment possible. 

Though I granted my suffering characters relief, something in me didn’t want to let them off too easily, so their previously innocent, unreflective relationship with sleep has been transformed into something new and indeterminate: “Nor do they talk about their sleep, commenting on its quality or recounting dreams; a new diffidence prevails, like the shyness of lovers reunited after an epic absence, as the one who stayed behind, noticing subtle changes in the other, wonders if this is indeed the longed-for union, or perhaps something else entirely.”  While I did mean the narrative to stand on its own as a speculative piece, I may also have been referencing the fact that we’re being changed by the pandemic in ways we can’t yet even identify. I think it’s good to guess but not be too certain about all the layers of thought in the work of writing.

*    *    *

Claire Bateman is the author of nine poetry/prose poetry collections. She is also a visual artist. Learn more about her here.
 

The Landscape Listens

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry contributor Holly M. Hofer

The title, “The Landscape Listens,” comes from “There’s a certain Slant of Light” by Emily Dickinson. 

In a “found words” exercise in my creative writing class in college several years ago I picked a few interesting words out of some journals my professor passed around. I began writing and the piece took shape as a reflection on discontentment, intrusive thoughts, religious ideas, personal history, and included some much-needed reassurance from talking flowers. Years and many edits later, I reflect on some of why I might have written what I wrote . . .

Connections between our feelings and thoughts and how we perceive the natural and human-arranged world are not just the stuff of metaphors and similes. There’s a balance, a mystery -- how much we are projecting our internal thoughts and feelings on to the world around us, and how much the external world around us is influencing our bodies and minds.

If we only listen hard enough or observe more carefully, will we hear or see the answers to console us or lead us to more meaningful lives? Is our external “landscape” attuned to us enough to give us these answers we seek, or to surprise us when we’re not seeking at all? Are we only hearing our own voice, in the end, whether it is condemning or consoling?

We’re not always in proximity to beautiful surroundings to soothe our spirits. And even the lovely things of life can seem sad, or insulting, if we’re in a difficult season.  In my poem, the descriptions of a “sore colored bug with round black bruises” or an arrogant cardinal seem to be distortions of the speaker’s discontent mind more than an accurate depiction of the state of the bug and bird in her garden. The extent to which we do this is perhaps not quantifiable, but I’m pretty sure it happens all the time at different levels.

If the negative perceptions of the speaker are of her own making, how does she get out of it?

The turn of the negative thinking at the end of the poem, with the flowers reminding the speaker that they and she never have flown like the birds or ladybugs, seems to have come from disruptive new source -- so was it the flowers captivating beauty speaking to her? Or was it the speaker’s own mind reacting to some sweets she just ate? Some new will power? Was it deus ex machina or the holy spirit? Does the landscape really listen, and can it respond?

 *    *    *

Holly M. Hofer, a native Floridian, currently works in the building engineering field. She's been published in Welter, The Avenue, and The Flagler College Review.

The House: An Essay on Labor and Loneliness

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry contributor Atreyee Gupta

On certain quiet after-midnight hours I hear the place where I live express itself audibly: wooden joints creak, old pipes groan, wind sifts through cracks. My home comes alive for me during these times. And I become not only an inhabitant and a caretaker of the space, but also a fellow living organism in conversation with the dwelling. In my poem, "The House," I explore the tension of this relationship and the impact labor and loneliness have upon that connection. My abode is "belligerent upon disruption," waiting "to be--cajoled into being." The building itself has expectations of its dweller and the narrator must navigate those burdens.

I was especially inspired by works such as "Pensive Hours" by Bamewawagezhikaquay (also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (born Asa Bundy Sheffey), and "My Grandmother's House" by Kamala Surayya (popularly writing under the name Madhavikutty). These poems deal with the interiority of human lives as they experience kinship, employment, and gender structures.

Joys and griefs are measured through the lens of home. Meditation and the natural world are juxtaposed with isolation and broken bonds within the domicile. For instance, the poet Surayya imbues her grandmother's house with personality. "There is a house now far away where /  once I received love / ... How often I think of going... / [to] pick an armful of / Darkness to bring it here to lie / Behind my bedroom door like a brooding dog." The building becomes more than an enclosure. The love and care experienced within provide character to the four walls.

However, for the person accomplishing the family chores, "Hours stretch --- / ... Days tumble-- / Halls become tunnels through which my life / walks without me." As Schoolcraft writes in "Pensive Hours," a life lived indoors can feel isolating: "The sun had sunk in a glowing ball / As lonely I sat in my father's hall." So often those performing domestic labor go unnoticed, something Hayden expresses beautifully in "Those Winter Sundays," "Sundays too my father got up early / ... then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday ... made / banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him." 

In my poem "The House" I wanted to hold these contradictions of love and loneliness, labor and leisure within tight proximity.

*   *   *

Atreyee Gupta explores the liminal spaces in which humans interact with society, geography, and identity. Atreyee's work has been published by Arc Poetry, Blue Cubicle Press, Rigorous, Jaggery Lit, and Shanghai Literary Review among others. For a fictional treatise on isolation and belonging, you can read Atreyee's short story, "Cocoon," published by Apparition Lit in their Wonder Issue. For other works, check out Bespoke Traveler, a digital alcove for curious travelers.

The Healing Wave

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Fiction contributor David Partington

My story "The Healing WAVE" is a coming together of two separate threads. I'd been reading a lot of Saki, the Edwardian short story writer, since the start of the pandemic, and found more than ten instances where he had built a plot around someone telling elaborate lies--often a teen lying to an adult. I wanted to try something similar, but fact checking has become so easy in the internet age that such a plot would hardly be tenable. For this reason I decided to make my protagonist a Luddite around 1999.

The other thread arose from my interest in relics of Catholic saints. Relics taken from the body of a saint (usually hair or a bone) are considered first-degree relics. Something that had belonged to, or was worn by a saint is a second-degree relic, whereas third-degree relics are objects that have been in contact with first- or second-degree relics. 

I love the idea of trickle-down holiness, and thought it would be funny to transfer it to a secular context. Britney Spears was one of the biggest celebrities in 1999, so she became my saint, and a boy who touched her pants thereby became a third-degree relic with healing powers.

The line, "I've seen people wearing the letter 't' on a chain around their necks, but those were never authorized," was problematic for the Bacopa editors, because normally one would have written "the letter T," capitalized without quotation marks. I'm grateful that they retained the lower-case because the letter T needs to look like a crucifix for the joke to work.

*     *     *

David Partington is a newly retired zookeeper who has taken up short story writing as a pandemic pastime.

Emissary on the Wall

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Prose Poetry contributor Danae Younge

I remember sitting on my living room couch at around 1:00 AM, looking at the ceiling and pockets of space where I might find an idea to craft a poem. That part is always the most painful--the waiting, knowing for certain I am going to create something before being able to sleep but not having any clue what it is. Even after the idea comes to me and I'm in the process of putting it into words, this intense itching feeling persists. I don't think I've ever related more to a sentiment about writing than Dorothy Parker's epiphany, "I hate writing, I love having written."

I had zoned out visually at that point, lost in my own 1:00 AM jumbled mind, when my eyes came back in focus, and I realized I had been staring at the painting of a girl hanging above the mantel for over 5 minutes. Maybe I wasn't completely zoning out. Maybe my subconscious was waiting for my thoughts to catch up. Either way, I identified that silent painting as the cause of my itch and began the process of giving it words.

I was inspired by the idea of contrasting motion with stasis--how things we believe to be crystallized in memory are actually constantly adjusting and evolving to accommodate present day. Many people comment on how the past affects the future, but I wanted to illuminate how this relationship is bidirectional, the moments we admire and observe like paintings are constantly looking back at us, affected by our current realities, emotions, and psyches.

. . . Now I notice how her ears perk up to eavesdrop, the spy, like poison weeping from the vial, like an antidote; every word we giggle into handfuls of midnight, hieroglyphic salt stains that whisper on the couch cushions, the shivers annexed from our minds during sleep.

 

As an undergraduate writer, I am beyond honored to be able to share this piece through such a highly regarded literary journal. As of December 2021, I am published/forthcoming in more than thirty literary magazines around the world. Some recent publications include PINK N♀ISE, published in Rust + Moth Magazine and "Nautilus," published in Perhappened Magazine. To read more of my work, head over to my website and subscribe for free updates.

 

After the Harvest

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Fiction contributor Scott Ragland

I was inspired to write "After the Harvest" after hearing an NPR segment about smoke from rice-stubble fires in northern India causing hazardous air-quality conditions in New Delhi. 

That dynamic touched on several interesting themes for me, particularly around the idea of the rural/urban divide and how technology can both save and threaten us. (And frankly, it was fun and stimu-lating to depart from the usual "write what you know" mantra!)

Then, in doing research for the story, I learned more about the history of famines in India, which gave me the idea of weaving some of that history into the story. It also got me thinking about generational family dynamics. 

Kuldeep learned from his father and, for the most part, continues farming the way he did. But his wife's death and his concern for his daughter's future make him realize he needs to break with the past. Baljit carries that further by embracing renewable-energy technologies. 

The story's closing scene of her scattering her father's ashes over the fields is intended to symbolize this evolution, both honoring his legacy (and, ironically, echoing his practice of leaving rice-stubble ashes in these same fields) as well as showing how his willingness to change planted the seed for her to move beyond it.

*    *    *

Scott Ragland has an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from UNC Greensboro. His flashes have appeared in Ambit, The Common (online), Fiction International, the minnesota review, and Brilliant Flash Fiction, among others. He lives in Carrboro, N.C., with his wife Ann, two dogs, and a cat.

 

Hunger for a More Fruitful World

 by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry contributor Frederick Livingston

Over the course of several weeks in late winter, I noticed the apples, plums and pears come alive in my new home on the Northern California coast. I struggled to understand the phenomenon at first. It didn't feel like spring yet and I was concerned that an unexpected frost might shatter this frail unfurling. Slowly, I noticed other plants revealing flowers, until eventually the landscape was covered in color. Suddenly spring felt definitive.

I wondered what would have happened if the fruit trees, with their long sense of time and deep roots, never took the first steps from winter to spring. Would the other flowers find that courage themselves or would they stay waiting for a more fruitful earth? It struck me how flowers, not leaves, were the first to emerge from buds, proving dreams precede the means.

Maybe there is a signal the trees feel that I do not, but I could not avoid the parallels between the bravery of this beauty and the question of how societal change occurs in an environment of cold uncertainty. Studying ecology and peacebuilding has shown me many paths to despair, but witnessing this unguarded faith in the future gave me a powerful example of how hope shapes our world.

            Pear Blossom
       Mendocino, California

this tree could be dead
or dreaming
...
what would the Earth look like
if all of us had such courage
to offer our most tender selves
not only when spring is certain
but when we can no longer bear
our hunger for a more fruitful world?

*     *    *

Frederick Livingston plants seeds in the liminal space between food justice, ecology, and peace. His work has appeared in literary magazines, academic journals, public parks, and bathroom stalls. Compelled by the power of metaphor to shape our world, he hopes to share in telling new stories.

Our Connection to Ancestors

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry contributor M. Cynthia Cheung

The Eyrbyggja Saga survives in fragmentary manuscripts written in Old Norse, the oldest part of which is thought to date from the thirteenth century. The Saga mentions the two berserkers that appear in my poem "Sightseeing," and anyone who travels to Iceland today can see the Berserkjahraun lava field, including the path the men were said to have made. 

Icelanders today can still read the Sagas directly in the original language. Just imagine the equivalent for modern English speakers like ourselves--being able to understand and savor Beowulf, or even Chaucer, without any translation! How do we, as individuals, cope with the inevitable changes that time brings to memory, myth, and language? Should we strive to maintain a connection to our ancestors--whether linguistic, cultural, spiritual, or biological--and if so how do we go about it?

I have no answers, of course. What I do know is that the time my husband and I spent walking along that path is now one of my most treasured memories!

 *     *     *

M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Sugar House Review, Zócalo Public Square, NOON: the journal of the short poem, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and others. Find her on Instagram @zoologicapoetry.

Writing "Dream Catcher"

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Fiction contributor Elizabeth Christopher

I started writing "Dream Catcher" a couple of months into the pandemic. We had been nestled at home together for weeks--my three kids, my husband, and I. My husband soon returned to work outside the house, but I never did. Rather, my office became a refinished room in the attic, where I wrote copy for a technology company during the day and worked at my fiction before sunrise and late at night.

When we had a COVID scare, I also slept in that attic room. Though I was self-sequestered, I became aware that I wasn't alone. I heard "wings beating behind plaster and lath" in the wee hours of the morning. One time, I got out of bed, crept across the dark room, tapped on the wall, and waited for a response. None came. But eventually a story did.

The story was about a woman older than I am. Her house was an empty nest, unlike mine. Her children no longer "fluttered around these rooms" like mine still do. Yet, alone in my attic space, I could feel her loss, her grief for her grown children who had flown off to faraway places, and I imagined the regret she might feel for those times she resented them, when they were small and "their presence felt heavy."

They were always climbing into my lap pulling at my arms. The air in these rooms was thick with their wanting. It was like gravity.

The guilt from her belief that she drove them away weighed on this woman, as did the guilt of killing the mice whose feces she found in her muffin tins, "like some miniature game of Mancala." But she would not make that mistake again. She'd protect those "small downy bodies huddled in a thatch of leaves and insulation" within her walls, those mice whose teeth made "sunbursts" in her cereal bag, and that bird that crashed into her window like "a tennis ball's thwack."

It's no wonder that birds flew into many of the pieces published in the 2021 edition of Bacopa Literary Review as the editors noted in their foreword. The pandemic sent us indoors, leaving us to look out at a smaller, more intimate world from our windows. What I saw, and I guess what many others did too, were birds--birds persisting in their nest building, in their singing, in their fluttering--day after day, season after season. How their small, nearly weightless forms unsteadied me and filled me with hope, just like stories do.

*     *     *

Elizabeth Christopher is a freelance writer living in Melrose, MA. Her stories and essays have been published in HuffPost, The Writer, Obelus Journal, and elsewhere. See more at Elizabeth Christopher's website.