Penrose Poetry Prize: Awarded for Excellence in Poetry from LGBTQIA+ Writers
$200, $100, and $50 cash awards to three winners with works to be published
with a special note on the first place work from our guest judge. 

On First Place Winner Holly Zhou’s Work:

There is so much to admire in each of these three poems, but what I keep coming back to is the inventiveness of their writing. How many poems have there been about horses, about love, about them both together. And yet when I first read through “When I Was Your Horse”, I found myself gasping at each linebreak, each image and sentence twisted around white space to crack out new meaning. That same rush of discovery pulled me just as hard through “When the Santa Ana Winds Come Through” as I sat reading it out loud in my living room. Every time I stumbled over an awkwardly placed period, and every time I found it to actually be perfectly placed, it was a reminder that nothing in this writing is accidental. Nothing is placed without care, without consideration. In the short lines of “Texting an AI During Cocktail Hour”, every word has earned it’s place. When the AI admits to wanting to be a gardner, it is wholly unexpected and yet, with hindsight, it’s obvious there was nowhere else we could have been lead. What I mean is that, throughout each of these pieces, Zhou makes it obvious over and over again that they are a poet who makes the language work for them rather than the other way around, taking letters and syllables into their hands and making them into some new, always surprising, always unexpected, whole. And that is something so special to see.

Lip Manegio is a writer and dyke from New England. His poetry has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle Magazine, Tin House, and been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. He also works as a designer & printmaker, serves as editor in chief at Ginger Bug Press, & is the author of We’ve All Seen Helena (Game Over Books, 2019). Find him at lipmanegio.com.