By Emma Platt ’26
Staff Writer
The Glascock Poetry Contest took place last week during the first weekend of National Poetry Month and featured work by students from across New England. The competition was judged by poets Eileen Myles, Evie Shockley and Hoa Nguyen. These established poets read selections of their work on the Saturday of the competition, but could only showcase a small portion of their work. For those wishing to explore more of their poetry, here are three more works by these authors.
“Prophesy” by Eileen Myles
In this poem, Myles uses both humor and evocative and odd imagery to transport the reader into a strange world that Myles writes from. Down to their writing utensil being “the devil’s cock” which is like “a fat burnt crayon.” Myles uses the Devil as a clear reference to the personification of pure evil. The poem is in free verse and lacks punctuation except for one period in the middle.
Myles is from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of UMass Boston. They have published twenty volumes of both poetry and prose fiction as well as art journalism and libretto work. They have received four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and several other accolades.
“her tin skin” by Evie Shockley
In this poem, Shockley writes about insecurity and wishing to be like another person on the surface. She wants the subject’s “tin skin,” which is repeated over and over in the poem. She describes the subject’s “militant barbie breast” and “mountainous” curves as things that she desires. Shockley writes about her own brownness as well: “i / want my brownness / to cover all but the silver / edges of my tin skin.”
A graduate of Northwestern University, the University of Michigan and Duke University, Shockley is from Nashville, Tennessee. She has had fellowships with Cave Canem, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. She has also been honored with the Holmes National Poetry Prize.
“Unused Baby” by Hoa Nguyen
In this poem, Nguyen writes with imagery from nature, folklore and religion to create a confusing but fascinating piece. She uses images of everything from blood to frogs to form strong images in the reader’s mind, drawing them in. This is similar to her general style of poetry, which poet Ocean Vuong once described as, “a poetics insistent on fragmentation and rupture as a mode of thinking and being in the world — one where, paradoxically, the very notion of fragmentation is, in itself, a whole. Her poems remind us that meaning, as we understand it, does not have to adhere to standard conventions of syntax.”
Nguyen was born in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, and grew up in the United States before settling in Canada where she now lives. She has written several books throughout her career and has been nominated for the Griffin Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She has taught creative writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as at community colleges
