Kathleen Rooney

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SIXTEEN DAYS IN A LINCOLN ROADSTER by Finalist Kathleen Rooney

& here they are: the left-most coast.

The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, on the Porciúncula River.

Easier, he admits, just to say L.A.

Plainly not alluvial, no longer a floodplain, the climate seems wild, spooky in its mildness.

Annexations & consolidations, grandiloquence & excess.

Ann lived here after they graduated—Nebraska has given you all she has to offer, said the commencement speaker.

Oil, orange juice, the sperm of movie stars.

Craning his neck at a variety of angles, Robinson sees no angels.

Less couple-in-a-car, more leaf-blown-about-on-the-earth-by-the-winds, they decide to crash at the Portal Motor Hotel—

a Motel, got it, but a portal to what?

They will go out at night: clarinets & trumpets—a maze of jazz.

Bred to earn his daily bread, Robinson once dropped out of vocational psych.

The motto of the city: augment augment augment.

Bored by pioneers, Robinson tries to be pioneering.

Prospector without prospects, or potentially too many?

Cement cement cement buries all trace of the old enterprise of gold.

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her most recent books include the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010) and the poetry chapbook, After Robinson Has Gone (Greying Ghost Press,2011).With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008). Her second full-length collection, Robinson Alone Provides the Image, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in November 2012.

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Patrick Moran is the Winner of the 2011 Editors' Prize in Poetry

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted. We were completely overwhelmed by fantastic manuscripts.

Congratulations to Patrick Moran for winning the prize for The Book of Lost Things!

Patrick Moran’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a variety of publications including Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Iowa Review and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is the author of two other collections of poetry, Tell a Pitiful Story and Doppelgangster.  Currently, he’s an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He lives in Fort Atkinson, WI, with his wife, the painter Bethann Moran, and their three children.

 

Finalists are listed below. Check back during the next few week for poems from Moran and our finalists.

–Borrowed Wave by Rachel Moritz
–Vitreous Hide by Michael Edgerton
–Doubter Come Home from a Drowning of Vision by Carrie Meadows
–The Silhouettes by Lily Ladewig
–After Hurricane by Mark McKain
–ROBINSON ALONE PROVIDES THE IMAGE by Kathleen Rooney
–Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope by Frank Montesonti
–Rancho Nostalgia by James Cihlar
–Mirror Inside A Coffin by Maureen Alsop
–Paradise for the Rest of Us by Gary Hawkins
–No Tee Vee by Andrew Terhune