Being In Bodies

Submissions to this poetry competition are now closed. Thank you to all who submitted – results will be published on our website by early March.

1st prize £250
2nd prize £50
3rd prize £25

Our judge, John L. Stanizzi, will also select up to 20 commended entries to be published alongside the prizewinners in a special issue of The Passionfruit Review.

Jump straight to…

About the theme
Judge’s note
About the judge
Submission guidelines

About the theme:

For this poetry contest, we are calling for poetry that engages with the experience of being in bodies.

We are always embedded in our environment. We inhabit physical bodies that exist in space while we are thinking, feeling, reading, and writing.

Send us poetry that recognises that embodiment in some way: poetry about breathing and breathlessness; poetry about soft touches and the sensation of sunlight on your skin; poetry about the body’s limits, its pain, its power and its powerlessness; poetry which makes us cringe and poetry that makes our blood boil; poetry that reminds us what it is to be human, to exist in and to interact with bodies.

As always, we are open to broad interpretations of the theme – feel free to surprise us and to stretch our imagination!

Submit


A Note from the Judge

This challenge is utterly wide open for such myriad and diverse avenues to travel. Poets are invited – indeed, encouraged – to take chances, to choose a subject that goes everywhere from the very difficult work of resuscitating our miraculous planet, to the nightmare that is the incessant warring that covers our world with strife, and death, and, and profound sadness, perpetually. They might tackle the profoundly complex subject of love; my goodness, how many different paths can that topic explore? Love. Love that sustains us, that teaches us about the crucial importance of peaceful behavior, of pacifism, of taking care of each other. Love that takes us down the darkest, most convoluted, and confusing paths imaginable.

I would encourage poets to open themselves up and allow that cosmos in which we live to fill them with ideas – that is just the beginning. Allow themselves to be teeming with ideas. Write them down. Organize them – remove the ones that don’t seem to have a place. On the other hand, perhaps connect
ideas that don’t, at least not on the surface, have any obvious connection, link them up, and run with that.

– John L. Stanizzi


About JOHN L. STANIZZI:

John L. Stanizzi is the author of fourteen books: Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time, High Tide-Ebb Tide, Chants, Four Bits, Sundowning, The Tree that Lights the Way Home, POND, Feathers and Bones, Viper Brain and SEE.

His nonfiction can be found in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Potato Soup Review, After the Pause, Adelaide, Metaworker, and many others. In 2021 he received a Creative Writing-Non-Fiction Fellowship from Connecticut’s Commission on the Arts, Culture, and Diversity, and also in 2021, Potato Soup named his story Pants best of 2021, and included it in their anthology of several years of outstanding short non-fiction.

John is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar. He is also a semi-retired English Professor at Manchester Community college in Connecticut. John was appointed The New England Poet of the Year in 1998. His memoir, Bless Me Father for I have Sinned will be ready for publication this coming summer.  John has just completed judging New England’s “New England Poet of the Year” contest.  He has worked as a Teaching Artist with “Poetry Out Loud,” the Poetry Foundation’s national recitation contest. John also curated the Connecticut “Fresh Voices Competition,” a contest for high school students all over Connecticut. For many years, John has also been in charge of The College/University Poet of the year. Recently, he just finished judging a contest for adult poets in London, and he is about to judge a contest of high school students in Belfast.

John lives in Coventry, Connecticut with his wife, Carol, and their three kitties.

You can read his poetry in Issue 3 of The Passionfruit Review or check out his website here.


Submission Guidelines

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