You should order this novel RIGHT NOW. It is BRILLIANT.
Boundless buckets of gratefulness to judges Simon Armitage and Jade Cuttle for selecting my poem “Outside Greater L.A.” as one of the highly-commended poems to be published in The Poetry School’s Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry! And congratulations to Jane Lovell for her prize-winning “Ming” 🙂
And you can download and peruse at your leisure the entire 2020 anthology here:
Yes, here are those promised cows, daffodils, and the absence of Holocaust poems:
You can almost smell that I-78 highway extension through the thin gloss of YouTube.
And here’s a friendly guide to jump straight to your favorite poems:
00:00 Introduction
01:02 The origin of life
02:28 A small dot appears. A genesis. A thing out of nothing
05:45 Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling
07.46 Departing from Sengen Jinja
10:00 Naming Things
11:46 Why My Kid Sobs at the Ice Cream Parlor
14:18 Not a Holocaust Poem
15:53 Cows & Daffodils
17:58 Lakawa a Stat on
20:05 A Single Swallow Doesn’t Signal Spring
20:39 Animal House
22:09 A poem written in my past life as a 15th century Georgian monk
23:32 From Out of the Darkness
26:47 Beacons of Light
28:02 Post 11
29:17 Epilogue
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/mick-imlah-poetry-prize-2019-shortlist/
Not for Sale
The minimum-wage worker drags the cart
full of children, all of them
so cute, put together
so perfectly. Along the cracks of the sidewalk,
the wheels twist, popping, the ride
far from smooth. Occasionally,
couples stop him, ask how much
for the little girl with pigtails, for the boy
with the black eye. The worker
doesn’t speak much English,
tells the passersby the kids aren’t for sale
until tomorrow, & only
at the store, not illegally
like this, smack in the middle of the street.
Jonathan Greenhause 