On behalf of Green Linden Press, I congratulate Jordan Stempleman for winning the fifth annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Green Linden Press will publish Spilt in the fall. Named for an essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater, the Prize awards $1000 and publication for a manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be and demonstrates anew the rich potentials of lyric language.
Spilt captures the experience of living between the domestic and the absurd, the lyrical and the narrative, oscillating between these states as a reflection of day-to-day existence. The poems explore both pandemic and non-pandemic experiences of separation and quarantine, blending whimsy, deadpan humor, stark realism, and pure fantasy. Each poem stands isolated as its own distinct world (or word), slightly out of sync with our reality of excess and overwhelming information. The poems in Spilt leak and escape, striving to connect with one another and with us, gathering socially, often stretching lines and language to their limits before pulling them back again.
Jordan Stempleman is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He also serves as the editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. Since 2011, he has organized the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to his editorial work, Stempleman is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute. Author website: https://www.jordanstempleman.com/
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I would like to honorably mention numerous poets whose manuscripts we found exciting and evocative:
Ulrich Baer for Griefmouth :: Mirrorstains
Bruce Bond for The Crawling Eye
Kevin Carollo for Notebook of a Return to the Nonnative Land
Monika Cassel for Rehearsal for Future Hungers
James D’Agostino and Karen Carcia for O to Z
Emily Dorff for The Far Pasture
Dale Going for Sonnets of Succor and Sorrow
Chris Green for The Dead Zoo
Carolyn Guinzio for The Moving Walkway Is Ending
Julie Hensley for Bent Cedar Mountain
Jeffrey Herrick for Divining and By the Numbers and The Future o Literature
Alan Hill for Daughterland
H.L. Hix for Close
H.L. Hix and Jonathan Weinert for Ghost Smoke
Kirsten Kaschock for Docenture: A Tale of Hue Told by the Estate
Gregory Kimbrell for Triangular Phantasm
Esther Mathieu for insistent ghost
Ben Miller for it all melts down to this
A. Molotkov for Dictionaries
Dayna Patterson for Our Lady of Thread
Laurel Radzieski for Leaf Manifesto
Rebecca Seiferle for If Language Is that Forest
Claire Marie Stancek for Of Care as of this Encounter
Chuck Sweetman for Late Bloomers: a Documentary Film
Laura Van Oudenaren for Behind the Bar / At the Bar
Mary Jane White for Sirventes: 366 Lyrics from 20 Masks
The Wishing Jewel Prize contest will re-open August 1 through November 30, 2025.
Best wishes and happy reading!
Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher