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Nutmeg Contest Judge for 2024-2025
Amy Nawrocki is the author of six poetry collections. Her awards include honors from The Connecticut Poetry Society, New Millennium Writings, The Hamden Arts Commission, and The Connecticut Center for the Book. Her most recent collection, Mouthbrooders, was a 2020 Connecticut Book Award finalist. Her nonfiction book, The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory, was a 2018 Foreword Review INDIES finalist for best memoir and has been awarded a Gold Medal for the Living Now Mind-Body-Spirit Awards. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut and is currently the Dean of the College Science and Society at the University of Bridgeport.
Nutmeg Contest Judge for 2023-2024
Steve Straight’s books include Affirmation (Grayson Books, 2022), which has won the 2023 William Meredith Award for Poetry, The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2012) and The Water Carrier (Curbstone, 2002). He was professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College. Currently he is the poet laureate of South Windsor, Connecticut.
Winners of the 2023-2024 Nutmeg AwardFIRST PLACE: Julia Meylor Simpson
Catharina Vermeer Poses for Her Husband In response to “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” by Johannes Vermeer This morning, Jan asked me to pose for him, ordering me to hold this, to touch that. As if I didn’t have enough to do. First, he covered a table with a red cloth, and placed my jewelry case just so, slipping a blue ribbon over the edge. Then he fidgeted with a map on the wall behind me. He moved it. And moved it again. Really, what need have we for maps? He turned my mother’s pitcher ever so slightly. Again, he said, touch this. Hold that. And to think where he dropped his muddy boots last night. Then he told me to turn. Like this. Turn more. He asked me to look toward the window. That’s when he whispered: Hold still! It was early morning. A bird sang in the garden. Church bells chimed as Delft rubbed its eyes. I heard the children stir downstairs. And the baby cry. The air was cool, but the sun had warmed the room. Ah, the sun! We so seldom see it here. I must get the clothes outside on the line today. And, then, suddenly – Oh, how do I put this into words? I felt the light pour over me. Like warm water, it splashed over my bare arm, soaking the fine hairs there, and then my breast. my neck, the curls under my hoofdoek. I don’t know how else to say this. I finally knew why Jan loves the light more than me. More than his children. More than life. White light saturated everything, turning my drab gown to the bluest of blues. I glowed. Yes, I glowed. And just then, Jan gasped. Again, hold still. Yes, like that. Hold. Still. Judge’s comment: Catharania Poses for Her Husband is a dazzling ekphrastic poem about one of Vermeer's famous paintings. The poet takes you inside the domestic world from Catharina's point of view, such that you are right there in the kitchen near the window. Vermeer, of course, is known for the play of light in his paintings, but the poet here is somehow able to embody that light as Catharina realizes the nature of her husband's obsession, and, indeed, the nature of creative expression. This is a gorgeous poem I could read over and over. In fact, I did. Honorable Mention: Judith Liebmann
On the Beach under a Night Sky How far away and long ago everything seems. They say the stars whose radiance I embrace have been dead for eons, their beams just an illusion, collapsing time and space. Yet here, under that arc of glittering dead light, my feet anchored in the still-warm sand, held firmer by Earth’s pull and the thick air of night, I stand, alive to the lure of the surf’s insistent murmur. I wade into the dark matter of the velvet sea, falling forward with outstretched hands. From my fingertips, as if suddenly thrown free, a wake of tiny glitter-balls spins off in strands. With each stroke, luminescence blooms anew as dinoflagellates and moonlike jellyfish, living creatures of the deep, gleam a delicate earthly blue. Mimicking the firmament for which I have been grieving, their glow suggests that close at hand celestial life exists - that even in this time-and-space allotment, it persists. Judge’s comment: Some might call this a fairly old-fashioned poem, with its strict rhyme scheme, but there is a lot of subtle work being done here under the guise of very natural language. Hearing the poem instead of seeing it, one might not even get how much it rhymes. Although not a strict Italian sonnet, it has the feel of the sonnet and has a wonderful rhyming last two lines, with sound, rhythm, and meaning worthy of the best sonnets. Honorable Mention: Catherine DeNunzio
The Couple For a moment in the early morning glow, I did not recognize them, their form merely suggested, their words indecipherable. Yet as they murmured, their exchange undulating like a silk slip hung by an open window, I became pure consciousness: my synapses undistracted by the impulse toward language; my mind freed from the burden of reasoning, disconnected from the vast turmoil looming at my threshold. I have always loved quiet scenes of spousal life in foreign language films. On a stage of domesticity, dialogue quotidian, instinctive, evocative, and within me, a longing untranslatable by subtitles on a screen. But this couple, this morning: they were you and I, and I understood that with you, what I yearn for would always be available, were I not I, were this not Earth. Judge’s comment: The couple is both a love poem and a paean to domesticity, simple and deep at once, with terrific power in the last two phrases. This poem resonates long beyond a reading. |
The Nutmeg Poetry Award
Made possible through the generosity of Connecticut Poetry Society Submission Period December 1 – January 31 Open to Connecticut Poets only Prizes: 1st $200; 2nd $100; 3rd $50 SECOND PLACE: Patricia Hale
Bar Room Pantoum Laramie, Wyoming, 1981 The door opened, and night barged in, air outside so cold snow squeaked under foot, cold enough to freeze a schoolteacher’s lungs. (She died, gas can frozen to her palm.) Nights were rough, so cold snow squeaked under foot, cold enough a crummy old bar felt good, felt like home. (A gas can frozen to her hand!) Nights were rough-- if you stayed away it meant you drank alone, so a crummy old bar felt good, felt like home, country music, and at the tap, the bar man talking (If you stayed away, you’d just drink alone) or washing glasses, dip in soapy, rinse in clear. Rocking country music, and at the tap, the bar man talking, keeping an eye on whose calm shell might crack. Or washing glasses, just a dip, a rinse, rocking on his barstool, drinking himself numb, LeAnn in the back-- keeping an eye on whose calm shell might crack. Mack playing pool for small stakes, low over the table, or on his barstool, numb, LeAnn in the back, her dress falling open, balance unstable playing for small stakes, leaning low over the table, unraveling her opponents with a hint of yes; her dress falling open, balance unstable. now she’s dancing, holding the skirts of her dress. unraveling the room with the possibility of yes, with her swirling skirts, and her thick black hair. LeAnn dancing, twirling in her dress-- her man watching, not yet straying from his chair. Judge’s comment: A pantoum is very challenging form, with its rhyme and repetition of lines, but this poet makes it seem like child's play. Tight, interlocking images create the wild scene of a bar in bleak mid-winter Wyoming, with a narrative of characters woven through it. This seems like merely natural wordplay, which belies its challenge. You sense repetition, but each stanza offers variations that reveal these people and this place vividly. Jealous poet here. THIRD PLACE: Terri Yannetti
Darkness and Light It would be known as the Great Northeastern Blackout, but for me, there was so much light in the midst of darkness. The blackout meant my father couldn’t go to the night shift he worked after his day job. He was home to help with my history project -- creating a fleet of Viking battleships from bars of soap. “Bars to be carved by an adult!” insisted the ancient nun, who taught fourth-grade history. We worked at the kitchen table with candles that stood like sentinels along the counters, and a full orange moon hovering inquisitively at the window; while my mother trooped the little sisters into a bedroom, where she would tell them fairy tales by heart in the glow of a flashlight. Wielding a paring knife, my father trimmed ribbons of soap off square bars, transforming them into slender vessels with symmetrical ends. I cut out an array of tricolored paper sails, hoisting them onto each ship with toothpick masts. Then I rimmed the ships’ starboard flanks with rows of glossy thumbtack shields, burnished gold in candlelight. “Fine work,” my father nodded, and I was so thrilled, I saw the sails begin to billow, though it was probably just an illusion from the flickering candle flames. Had you listened as we worked, you would have heard me recount what our class had learned about Viking voyagers, dwelling on stories that first stopped them from venturing out into uncharted waters. Were there hungry sea monsters or horned dragons bellowing fire that turned waves into writhing infernos? I may have shivered at such imagery, to be reminded by my father that daunting as such voyages seemed, what seafarers most feared was what they did not know. “So it helps to know all you can,” he added. “Yes,” I exhaled, pulled back to our kitchen in the cocoon of a blackout; to hear from down the hall the easy cadence of my mother’s voice, but not the words, interrupted by my sisters’ surprised squeals at hobgoblins of another kind. More than half a century has passed, and what I know is light and darkness are threaded through every life. I’ve watched the moon shift shape and change size. Seen it climb the sky, gild landscapes, glint off the headstone of my father’s grave. Judge’s comment: Darkness and Light takes us inside a child's experience of the great blackout of the Northeast while controlling the description through the adult's looking back. The scene is vivid and real, and the theme of darkness and light is woven into the narrative so well, along with fear of the unknown, "hobgoblins of another kind." Light from candles and moonlight is a touchstone throughout the poem, and moonlight cinches a great ending that calls back to the opening section. Honorable Mention: Adele Evershed
Lies and Other Things I Found Behind the Bins In the beginning You asked me what I was made of I laughed and said sugar and spice But really consummation made me I remember the youth club sermon on abstinence And asking if it came from absinthe The priest sending me outside into the light Where the oil was made holy in puddles And the only hims were called Dave or Bobby Who offered me communion behind the bins With ash under their feet and lies on their lips They gave me a taste of cider And it was sweet like subterfuge I have tried so hard to forget those years The sadness of a sunrise That smells of stale beer and nameless fucks Or the melancholy song of the thrush That walked me home on a Sunday morning I do not think we will live happily ever after Because endings only happen one way But you have told me you will never lie And each Sunday after you put out the bins You make me a cup of tea and say ‘No sugar because you’re sweet enough’ And when you kiss me I pretend it feels like redemption Judge’s comment: This poem comes in three sections: establish the present, explore the past, then attempt to reconcile with the present. The middle has a raw honesty (even though it also has some nice puns) and the grounding present section is sweet. This is a love poem cherishing the present while wary of it. |
Please note that winners of a CPS contest in a given year are not eligible to win in any contest of the year immediately following.