Interview with Meadowlark poet Tess Barry by Emily Mohn-Slate

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"opening doors to the unexpected and beautiful"

poet and MFA program director Tess Barry on reading as mindfulness, learning to hear your own voice, and the necessity of finding a community of writers ✨

By Emily Mohn-Slate 

This is a Beginner’s Mind interview, a series that explores the intersection of creative practice and mindfulness. Zen master Shunryū Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.” This series shines a light on the practices that sustain people in their daily lives and open the path to new possibilities. Subscribe for free below to make sure you don’t miss any future interviews. ✨

Today, I’m very excited to share an interview with poet and MFA Director, Tess Barry. The thing about Tess is that once you’re in her orbit, it’s inevitable that you will come to know and love her. For several years, I had the gift of being in a small poetry workshop with Tess and a few other poets I met through the Madwomen in the Attic. Over those years, Tess was deep in the writing of her debut poetry collection, The Marvelous Real, which just came out last fall. Once a month, we’d meet at Tess’s house on the South Side of Pittsburgh, and eat and drink and laugh and talk poems together. My time around Tess’s table shaped not only my poetics, but also my sense of how vital it is to have a community of smart readers as you do the hard work of making a book.

Tess Barry’s poems are defined by generosity and capaciousness. Her poems gather in and make room. There is a deep wildness, too—something strange and off-kilter that shifts our perceptions and changes the atmosphere. Richard Blanco says of Barry’s book, “The Marvelous Real is the perfect title for this inspiring collection. Real, because it graces the many seemingly ordinary moments of our lives, transfixing them into the extraordinary, and marvelous, because Barry guides us on a magical, dream-like journey through the many sublime spaces/places her poetic soul has witnessed, imagined, or desired. All this conveyed through a musicality that soothes us into our truest selves.”

Tess shares a rich window into her practices, many excellent reading recommendations, and a brilliant prompt from Terrance Hayes. Read on, friends.✨

Tess Barry

What are your writing/creative practices? Do you have any rituals or habits that help you in your daily life?

My writing practice usually begins with reading. Ideally, I like to sit and read a writer I love before writing. It helps to still my mind and move my mind into a quiet creative space. I like to write in the morning first thing. I love to read poetry, but also love fiction and nonfiction.

Lately, I have been reading some wonderful books – The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, who joined us as a guest writer at Carlow’s January MFA residency and will join us in June in Dublin for the Ireland residency. It is an epistolary novel and just wonderful.

I am also loving Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh’s award-winning collection of lyric essays Unmothered, Untongued. Lee is a gorgeous poet and brilliant writer of all genres and her work astounds me in its depth and power. Lee takes language and form to new places. Lee is a mentor in our MFA program and a wonderful person and great teacher. I go back to collections of poetry I love and lately it has been Nick Laird’s Feel Free. He is an astounding poet and has visited our MFA program in Ireland.

What are the most important mindfulness/spiritual practices in your life?

Reading closely is a mindfulness practice and has been a balm and joy throughout my life. If I am feeling unsettled, reading stills me and returns me to myself. Spending time in nature is a great way of entering a mindful space, too. I love to be outdoors and find the natural world is another gateway into the creative self, a place to still the noise and quiet the mind.

Last spring we had robins build nests on our front and back porches and it was beautiful to see the nests created and have the robins swooping in and out when you opened the doors. It was magical. Mindfulness is like that, creating a space where you can open doors to the unexpected and beautiful. I love to listen to all kinds of music and music is transportive in a different way, sometimes listening to music can get me to a place of mindfulness. I have had many mindfulness practices I’d say from running, to walking, to gardening, walking our Saint Bernard, Lucy, and reading or listening to music. Reading helps to build one’s interior life and without that you would have nothing to draw from in terms of creativity. I am not sure who said “the best writers are writers who read,” but it is very true.

Do you have a mantra or motto related to your creative/mindfulness practices/life? What piece of wisdom do you have on a post-it note to help you remember it?

I don’t think I have a mantra or motto, but I have certain lines from writers I love or literature I love that I might write down, save, and return to.

When I was growing up my mother had a James Baldwin quote she posted around our house and it is a quote I always return to. It comes from Nobody Knows My Name, More Notes on a Native Son, and I’ll excerpt it here:

“To be with God is to really be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward makes me better. I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others. Love does not begin and end in the way we think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” —James Baldwin

I love this Baldwin quote and for me it speaks to the creative process—a journey toward something we do not understand, which in the going toward makes us better.

I also love this quote from the late Australian poet Les Murray (he is a poet I love and was always discussed as a candidate for the Nobel prize):

“Everything except language knows the meaning of existence” —Les Murray, from his poem “The Meaning of Existence”

Here’s the full poem:

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language

knows the meaning of existence.

Trees, planets, rivers, time

know nothing else. They express it

moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body

lives it in part, and would

have full dignity within it

but for the ignorant freedom

of my talking mind.

—Les Murray, from Poems the Size of Photographs, (FSG, 2002).

Jack Gilbert is another favorite poet of mine and I love this quote from Gilbert’s poem “Tear it Down”:

“We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows.”

One of my favorite fiction writers is the brilliant Irish writer Claire Keegan. And I am so fortunate to have heard her read and speak about writing many times at Carlow’s MFA residencies in Ireland. She is a brilliant writer and teacher. I could fill a book with quotes from Claire’s talks to us and here is one I love:

“It is the reader in me that is drawn to the writing. I’m always striving to please the reader in me. What suits the reader in you? Trust the reader inside you.” —Claire Keegan

at a January MFA residency dinner in Pittsburgh with Carlow MFA alums K.J. Bryant, Rachel Walton, and Beth Casteel. Carlow’s MFA community is filled with people I love and admire and is where I spend much of my time.

What helps you when you get stuck with your creative/writing or mindfulness practices?

It is helpful to me to read, to be in community with other writers and artists, to take a walk, visit a museum, listen to music. I had an experience at an exhibit some years ago that is a good metaphor for getting to that deep creative space—I saw an exhibit at The Cloisters in NYC–it is a sound installation by Janet Cardiff called The Forty Part Motet, and consisted of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel. The exhibit was a reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui from the 16th century by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585). Spem in alium, which translates as “In No Other Is My Hope,” is perhaps Tallis’s most famous composition. As you walked through the exhibit you could stop at each speaker to hear individual unaccompanied voices but then also have the cumulative effect in this beautiful space of all voices. Spem in alium and The Forty Part Motet is a great metaphor for FINDING YOUR WAY to the creative process, getting close and stilling yourself and leaning in to hear one voice—your voice—which paradoxically is what gives you access to cumulative voices. I grew up in a family of 10 children and heard many voices in my home and hear them still. One central aspect to good writing is in the authenticity of one writer’s particular voice, but also the ability for a singular voice to convey the universal, the paradox of the particular voice that gives us access to the universal voice of humanity.

What does the phrase “beginner’s mind” mean to you? Does it connect to your creative/or spiritual practices? How?

I think “beginner’s mind” is a great way to think about creating art, writing. The more I learn the less I know about poetry and writing, about the nature and mystery of the creative process. The beginner’s mind suggests a state where you are uninhibited and not self-conscious, free to be honest. A state where you might act from instinct as opposed to being weighted down by expectation or foreknowledge. It suggests an expansive and natural place and so a perfect place from which to write. I’ve experienced a blissful state sometimes when writing when overtaken by self-forgetfulness and it is a magical thing. I think beginner’s mind is the space I am always trying to get to and write from, and in the age of distraction it is even more difficult to get there for long periods of time. Reading or music can get you there. Walking or exercise might, being out in nature. I think stepping away from phones and screens is key to getting there. The space of beginner’s mind is similar to moments of great joy or sadness, in that it is a space that allows for moments of sudden insight and clarity. It connects to my creative practices because it is a sacred space I want to return to. But it is also an elusive space given the age we are living through and the difficulty in getting to that deep space of quiet within ourselves when we are distracted 24/7 with screens and bombarded with information.

Are there any books / writers / teachers / approaches that have been transformative for you that you would recommend to readers?

There have been many books, writers, and teachers who have been transformative in my life. I love literature and have been shaped by many writers I return to including Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Ruth Stone, Terrance Hayes, Claire Keegan, Carol Ann Duffy, Les Murray, Lynn Emanuel, Simon Armitage, Lucille Clifton, Sheila Carter-Jones (her latest book Every Hard Sweetness is really powerful and transformative, Rebecca Morgan Frank (a brilliant contemporary poet), and Kenzie Allen (her Cloud Missives is a beautiful book), as well as countless others.

I’ve had great teachers including our former MFA and Madwomen director Jan Beatty, Lynn Emanuel, all the Carlow MFA mentors in the U.S. and Ireland. In high school and grade school, I had exceptional English teachers who fostered my love of literature and desire to write. One of the best teachers I ever had was Marah Gubar (daughter of Susan Gubar) who taught in my graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh and now teaches at MIT. A fantastic person and professor who really understood literature’s power and a great storyteller. I took a literature course with her and learned so much about writing and reading.

at Trinity College, Dublin in June 2025 at the Carlow MFA residency. Tess Barry with Poets and MFA mentors Enda Wyley, Jean O’Brien, and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh

I would recommend to women writers Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops, a singular community of writers. I’ve been a Madwomen since 2007, a Madwomen mentor and instructor, and I think it is so important for writers to have a community. I found a great one in Madwomen and then through Carlow’s MFA program. I would also recommend starting a workshop with other writers.

There are so many communities that have been meaningful to my growth as a writer and to my life – Carlow’s Madwomen in the Attic, Carlow’s MFA program, and the many workshops I have been a part of, including the Josephine Street poets, who met at my house for a number of years (Lisa Alexander, Jennifer Jackson Berry, Rachel Mennies, Michelle Stoner, Bernadette Ulsamer, and Emily Mohn-Slate). The Josephine Street poets were a great group of post-MFA writers. This workshop was intimate and strengthened me as a writer and editor. The Josephine Street group remain poets I deeply admire and cherished friends.

I am so grateful for Carlow’s MFA community and the chance to come together with our mentors, students, alums, and guest writers twice a year. It is such a tonic to the darkness of our current world. One book I would recommend is: Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (Univ of Iowa, 2010). It is a great book for teachers of poetry and is comprised of a number of short essays—great for teachers AND also a fantastic book for poets about poetry.

A Prompt from Tess ✨

This is one of my favorite prompts. It is by the wonderful poet Terrance Hayes and comes from a book entitled The Working Poet (Autumn House Press, 2009). It is a complicated, involved prompt but always produces great results. I encourage people to give it a try. CLICK HERE FOR PROMPT

Order your copy of The Marvelous Real HERE!

TESS BARRY is the author of The Marvelous Real, a poetry collection published in December 2025 by Meadowlark Press and a finalist for Meadowlark’s 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize. Barry was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. Twice a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Magazine’s Poetry Award, she has also been shortlisted several times for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her work has been widely published in the U.S. and abroad and appeared in journals such as: Aesthetica, The Compass Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Cordella Magazine, Mslexia, The Louisville Review, North American Review, and The Stinging Fly, among others. She is a fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the director of Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, a low-residency program in the U.S. and Ireland.

More from Tess ✨

• Order your copy of The Marvelous Real from Meadowlark Press!
• Follow Tess on IG @tess.barry88 and @carlowumfa to follow Carlow’s great MFA community
• Learn more at her website

One of my favorite poems from The Marvelous Real

Your turn: What resonates with you? Do you have any other questions or thoughts to share with Tess?

Leave a Comment

Congratulations to 2026 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner David Ebenbach!

 

We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 
2026 Birdy Poetry Prize
These Blessings Are All We Have 
by David Ebenbach!

Congratulations, David!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Ebenbach is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, winners of such awards as the Juniper Prize, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Birdy Poetry Prize, among others. He has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. David lives with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Georgetown University's Center for Jewish Civilization and works with faculty and graduate students to support their teaching at Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. You can find out more at davidebenbach.com.

We would also like to extend a hearty congratulations to our Birdy finalists and semi-finalists!

Meadowlark would like to thank Poet Laureate of Kansas
Traci Brimhall for serving as this year's judge!

Here, you can watch the recording of the announcement event, including readings from David Ebenbach and our 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025 winners, Alison Hicks (Knowing Is a Branching Trail), Jonathan Greenhause (Cupping Our Palms), Alicia Rebecca Myers (Warble), and Catherine Anderson (Afloat)! Thank you to all who attended the event and made it a special, celebratory evening!

 

2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist Book Launch Details! The Marvelous Real by Tess Barry

2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist

Click HERE to place your order!

Book Launch Event: January 3, 4:30 p.m.
Carlow University, Gailliot Center

In The Marvelous Real, Tess Barry illuminates the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary mystery and majesty of life, love, death, family, and the ghostly world beyond. With precise, vivid language, Barry renders a reality that is always more than meets the eye, always shifting and deepening our perception of the known and unknown. Barry invites readers into a lyrical world of joy, wonder, loss, humor, and human connection. The Marvelous Real is a journey in sound, rhythm, and imagery—from a mother as Walden Pond, to déjà vu in Old San Juan, to a childhood game of old church lady bank robbers, a work from Picasso’s Blue Period, and a brother’s hands. These poems illustrate the power of language to embody and transcend human experience. Barry’s debut is indeed a marvelous real.

Tess Barry was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. Twice a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Magazine’s Poetry Award, she has also been shortlisted four times for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her work has been widely published in the US and abroad and has appeared in journals, such as: Aesthetica, The Compass Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Cordella Magazine, Mslexia, The Louisville Review, North American Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Stinging Fly, among others. Barry holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Carlow University and an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a Fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the Director of Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, a low residency program in the US and Ireland.

What Readers are Saying:
The Marvelous Real is the perfect title for this inspiring collection. Real, because it graces the many seemingly ordinary moments of our lives, transfixing them into the extraordinary, and marvelous, because Barry guides us on a magical, dream-like journey through the many sublime spaces/places her poetic soul has witnessed, imagined, or desired. All this conveyed through a musicality that
soothes us into our truest selves.
—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

These poems touch on the magic and mystery of childhood mixed with the serene undercurrent of nature and observations from a growing transcendence of the very world we understand as real. In these poems you can’t get lost, only found.
—Sheila Carter-Jones, author of Every Hard Sweetness

Emptied of all but wildness, Tess Barry’s poetry lets the energy of life flood across the page: a mother as Walden Pond, a sailor on a bus to Atlantic City, the loneliness of J. D. Salinger, the edgy Irish diaspora, all her essences of being alive transform the reader, reminding us that “My whole life has been ripe with wild fruit.” The Marvelous Real is a major achievement in Irish-American poetry.
—Thomas McCarthy, Irish author of Pandemonium and Plenitude

Tess Barry celebrates being alive in The Marvelous Real. These are poems to treasure, to read and reread, a poet immersed in and enchanted by language.
—Jean O’Brien, Irish author of Stars Burn Regardless

Tess Barry’s The Marvelous Real is a paean to the small, seemingly ordinary moments of our lives—infusing these moments with magic, wonder, and a capacious gratitude in which the real is, indeed, rendered exceedingly marvelous. These are earthy poems filled with tenderness, humor, and the imagination of a glorious mind. The Marvelous Real is a sensual and stunningly beautiful debut.
—Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner, Afloat, Available for Preorder!

 Afloat by Catherine Anderson Is Now Available for Preorder!

Click HERE to place your order!

ABOUT THE BOOK
In Afloat, Catherine Anderson inspects the world around her with the detail of a scientist, the imagery of a painter, and the introspection of a philosopher. Through frequently “quotidian” scenarios—learning to knit, cutting rhubarb, purchasing flowers at the grocery store—Anderson ruminates on themes of love, spirituality, and justice, celebrating the beauty and wonder around us but not shying away from the loss and pain that so often accompany them. These poems saint all they touch—feather dancers, bell ringers, rubber pastries, tardigrades—revealing the holy in the everyday and the profound ties that connect us to each other, the natural world, and all that has come before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Anderson has published five collections of poetry, including Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press, 2019), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press, 2014), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press, 2000), In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books, 1983), and Afloat (Meadowlark Press, 2025). In 2022, a memoir about her late brother who had nonspeaking autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters.

2026 BIRDY POETRY PRIZE SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN! 

SUBMIT HERE!

Congratulations, Catherine Anderson, 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner!

We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 
2025 Birdy Poetry Prize
Afloat by Catherine Anderson

Congratulations, Catherine!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Catherine Anderson has published four collections of poetry, including, Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press); Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press); The Work of Hands (Perugia Press) and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books). In 2022, a memoir about her dear, late brother who had nonverbal autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters.

We would also like to extend a hearty congratulations to our Birdy finalists and semi-finalists!

Meadowlark would like to thank Jose Faus for serving as this year's judge.

Here, you can watch the recording of the announcement event, including readings from 2024 and 2025 winners, Alicia Rebecca Myers (Warble) and Catherine Anderson (Afloat), as well as readings from 2024 and 2025 finalists, Ruth Bardon (Witness) and Huascar Medina (Protest as Love Poem). Thank you to all who attended the event and made it a special, celebratory evening!

 

OUT NOW! Warble by Alicia Rebecca Myers - 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner

We are overjoyed to announce the release of the 
2024 Birdy Poetry Prize winner, 
Warble by Alicia Rebecca Myers

OUT NOW!
ORDER HERE!

About the Book:

The poems in Alicia Rebecca Myers’s debut collection explore a fascination with the phenomena within and beyond a person—whether becoming a mother or observing a sea turtle migration. The language is rich with metaphor but conversational and direct, with a compelling balance between prose and lineated poems. Myers finds in the everyday, in oxidized pesto and a crepe paper streamer, new ways of expressing shared experiences. She captures the full range of human emotion—sadness, grief, humor, and overarching love—as the poems process taking care of one aging parent in the wake of losing the other. Warble also contextualizes what it means to be a daughter and a mother in modern-day America by offering snapshots of pop culture and the wider American experience, from Love Is Blind to gun violence. This is a book that asks of us, “In a lifetime, what do we keep, and what do we release? What sings on beyond our time, and how are we immortalized by that music?” 

About the Author:

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, FIELD, River Styx, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, december, Rattle, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was selected as a winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series, and she has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson residency for poetry and a Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference nonfiction scholarship. Warble is her first full-length book.

 

A Comment from Our 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge:

Warble encompasses the poetry of connection to the life force, weaving and unraveling immersions into grief and birth, presence and yearning, mother love and father loss, blossom and flight. These poems are compelling, brave, intimate, and, most of all, unafraid of telling the truth. I found that once I started reading them, I couldn’t stop, and I was called back to re-read many stunning dives into the tender and fierce edges of life, such as the complex compassion in “Addling,” the daring energy in “Open Water,” and the breathless love of “You Ask Me to Tell You the Story.” The title itself—Warble—speaks to that in-between state (as well as a bird) of being alive, trilling through each poem. 

I picked this collection because of how deeply the poet wrote from what Edward Hirsch calls “the poetry of affection,” the poetry that connect us to our innate and vulnerable humanness. This quality is so vital when it comes to working with the fragments of brokenness, despair, and horror around us to craft a life, sustain a community, and behold the living earth with wonder and courage.

—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2009-2013), author of How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems

OUT NOW! Witness by Ruth Bardon - 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist

Meadowlark Press is proud to announce the publication of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist, Witness by Ruth Bardon!

Order Here!

About Witness:
Finalist of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize

Ruth Bardon’s debut poetry collection takes you by surprise.  These confident poems—written in succinct, definitive, and easily digestible diction—take specific moments from her early, middle, and later years and turn them into stories that are evocative and mysterious.

About the Author:
Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Demon Barber (Main Street Rag, 2020) and What You Wish For (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She is also the author of Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells (Ohio University Press, 1997).

Praise for Witness:
If specificity is indeed universal, then Ruth Bardon’s Witness is a debut poetry collection for us all. Imbued with the rich details of life, these tightly crafted yet generous poems enlarge our days with vision and grace. “I think of how strong I was,” Bardon writes, “slicing through a world / where I couldn’t even breathe, / and claiming it as mine.” These are works of wonder and precision, and whether turning a keen eye toward a solar eclipse, a truck packed with caged chickens, strange new technologies, or her own indelible past, Bardon’s poems implore us to pay attention, to bear witness to the horrors and wild joys of existence.
—Jared Harél, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject

There’s a passion just below the surface of Ruth Bardon’s poems that sometimes rips its way out, as it does in the last lines of “Near the End”: “I just wanted to make my voice / into something jagged and sharp / and to slash somebody with it.” We’re not told exactly what’s going on in this hospital scene, but we sense the extreme emotion of the speaker. The same thing happens at the end of “Typography,” in which the good girl in nursery school misbehaves because after earning only green or yellow lights, she “wanted to know how red would feel.” But, in “Typography,” and in Bardon’s poetry in general, we’re more likely to find emotion expressed “by taking the time / to find the perfect word,” whether the poem is centered on the significant events of family life and stories of birth and death or on stories of hurricanes, floods, and Halley’s Comet. Dividing her poems into three sections—Early Years, Middle Years, Later Years—Bardon is “claiming [life] as mine,” and she claims it for us too, as witnesses.
—Brian Daldorph, Kansas Poems and Words Is a Powerful Thing
 
Witness explores the ways in which the stories that make up families continue to be written in the margins of our personal stories. Bardon’s intuition for narrative is guided by a poetic sensibility that uses images and lyricism to recreate memories and experiences. While time acts as the framework of Witness, its poems speak to the present moment in perceptive ways. Nuanced and inviting, Witness teaches us to see.
—José Angel Araguz, Rotura and Ruin & Want

In Witness, Ruth Bardon’s use of precise spare language and perfect metaphors captures and penetrates the essence of each subject like the stabbing of a squirming bug. It is a monument to modern life, full of understated emotion, excellent and fine. Thank you, Ruth, for giving the world this collection.
—Ruth Maus, Valentine and Puzzled

Congratulations, Alicia Rebecca Myers, 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner!

We are overjoyed to announce the winner of the 
2024 Birdy Poetry Prize, Warble by Alicia Rebecca Myers

Congratulations, Alicia!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, FIELD, River Styx, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, december, Threadcount, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2015), was selected by Kiki Petrosino as winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series, and she has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson residency for poetry and a Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference nonfiction scholarship. Warble is her first full-length book.

We would also like to extend a hearty congratulations to our Birdy finalists and semi-finalists!

Meadowlark would like to thank Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg for serving as this year's judge.

Here, you can watch the recording of the announcement event, including readings from 2021-2014 winners: Alison Hicks (Knowing Is a Branching Trail), Jonathan Greenhause (Cupping Our Palms), Zachary Lundgren (Turkey Vulture), and Alicia Rebecca Myers (Warble)! Also included are comments on what Caryn found so alluring about Warble. Thank you to all who attended the event and made it a special, celebratory evening!