Meritage Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2003 Meritage Press Holiday Poetry Contest, judged by multi-awarded poet and educator Patrick Rosal:

FIRST PLACE:
"Beginners Luck" by Luisa A. Igloria

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
"Jungle of Hair" by Tala Kernan
"Andrea" by Raymond T. Calbay

Meritage Press thanks all the poet-contestants who participated; we can sincerely say that there were many fine poems beyond the named winners.

All the entries were judged anonymously, so that the poems were viewed entirely on their merit. Here is what Patrick Rosal had to say about the winning entries:

I like poems with musicality, a charge in the sounds of words, the way a line breaks with and against the conventional pace of a sentence. I'm even more biased to the poem that joins all that earstuff with a goodeye. Mostly, I like it funky. "Beginner's Luck" wasn't the funkiest poem in the batch (though there is a funkiness in its delight), but it hauled together all the goodshit I like in a poem--thirtyfish-worth. I like its plainspokenness stretched across its emotional depth. I like how it does something I'm still learning to do in poems--it tells a story. I ain't a Catholic no more, but maybe I miss Catholicism enough to love the meditative qualities of "Beginner's Luck." I like how it moves. I like how it stops. I like how the end darkens to a whispered epiphany.

I picked two honorable mentions as well--and there were a good number of poems submitted that could have occupied these two spots. As I read the entries, I was humbled by the variety of voices, styles, temperaments--not to mention the level of craft. It was a reminder to me that poems don't just speak alone--they speak to one another. That said, I'm including "Andrea" and "Jungle of Hair" as much for the quality of work as for their testimony to a multitude of poetries: "Andrea" for its rhetorical whorls and its metaphysical pronouncements ultimately broken into something more imperfect, physical, and, therefore, human; "Jungle of Hair" because no one writes ditties much any more, and if they do, they aren't done well or with such honest wonder and affection.

*****

Here are the winning poems:

BEGINNER'S LUCK
By Luisa A. Igloria

…unsure of how to use a body after life inside the eye.
~ Leslie Adrienne Miller

Some things might never happen again.
The day I caught my first then thirty other fish,

I swam out of sleep lured by a memory of bread
offered to my lips--yeasty and kneaded into hand-sized

rolls, dusted with salt, the kind that comes wrapped in a brown
paper bag-- This is what I hugged to my chest as I ran

toward a blare of horns in the driveway,
friends calling and waving. We piled gear into pickup

trucks: tackle boxes and slender rods of plexiglass, taut
nylon filaments vibrating to the slightest touch. Packed

ice rattled slightly, settling in coolers. Someone
passed a metal flask of coffee, strong and black.

Rolling down the window as we pulled into the highway-
so early yet-- I felt the autumn air lay its cool clean hook

against my cheek. In neighborhoods we passed, the smells of
charred bacon and toast. Factory smokestacks thinned

to charcoal smudge above a line of white
birch. An hour later I crouched on the banks of the Illinois

River, threading bait, damp spreading through
the cords of espadrilles I foolishly picked to wear. I learned

to cast out line with a flick of the wrist-- and then release.
Someone had brought ham and cheese, hard-boiled eggs, paper

napkins. My hunger wasn't gone, only for the moment blunted;
the others found amusing how seriously I took to

this work of waiting. Resting on my haunches I listened to water,
its cadence tempered by growing light, when the surface broke.

As I cycled the reel, the water seemed to tear. Amid the cries
of blue gill, blue gill! and a scattering of applause because

it was my first , someone's plastic fork fell into the river,
swirling like a needle sprung from its compass. I saw the arc

and felt along my pulling arm the frantic jerking in the mud,
a tremor that echoed in the cut amber of its eyes, the rims

that quickly filled with ruby. We bent to see, to lift the thrashing
body into the waiting pail. And so it went, all morning the lines

thrown across water, the luring of trout, of silver bass;
fingerlings that darted freely in the shallows like swarms

darkening a different sky. Like answers they came, each
one that followed the first as though I'd tossed the same

question into the depths. Intention or luck? Paired
with blank patience, which does the unknown

reward with virtue? Later that evening the catch-
basket in my sink glistened with scales. Faithlessly I slit and gutted,

vaguely recalling stories of fishermen's wives finding a prize: a pearl, a golden ring
to hold for ransom from a king. At last, the icebox emptied, the surplus of silver

bodies bagged and ziplocked for giving away to friends. How to tell
the story plain, skirting disguise or parable? You have to know

there are mornings that feel as if I'm standing on a lip of rock, my shoes
distended with water, wondering what will answer, if at all, when I call.

==============

JUNGLE OF HAIR
By Tala Kernan

How would you like to go on a safari in my hair?
You can explore everything everywhere!
You can get caught in all the tangles,
You can trip in all the knots,
And you can slip on all the non-conditioned spots!

===============

Andrea
By Raymond Torio Calbay

Outside, rain clouds slowly spread
To remind us why we are:
The mortal and the beautiful.
Between tiled grounds where our feet anchor
Our fragility
And the dissolving blue hue
Of the horizon above us,
What else do we care for, and fear?

You say you are tired of the inconsequence of it all.
Our movements are not a matter of reaching
Finalities than they are fated sequences, our bodies
Apprehended in transit by moments incognito.
After all, who minds if we ever breathe and be?

Such sweet surrender. But didn't we always know
How naturally, brutally hard, the world is,
How we battle always surface bound?
Our flesh and bone constancy, and fate,
Passes with the pelting rain just now.
Swiftly, softly we slide.

Our tragedy, and seasoned redemption then,
Is to remain here, where we are.
Understand, we can never plunge headlong
with our pains
Suspended. We allow sadness
In and out of our bodies
Holding what we are accused of shaping, willing
Even if it breaks us overtime
To seek and sing release, fix our selves together
With the one cracking the thunder in the sky.

*****

The following bios provide more information about the 2003 winners:

Luisa A. Igloria is a poet, fictionist, and essayist who has published five books under the name Maria Luisa Aguilar Cariño: Cordillera Tales (New Day,1990), Cartography (Anvil, 1992), Encanto (Anvil, 1994), In the Garden of the Three Islands (Moyer Bell/Asphodel, 1995), and Blood Sacrifice (University of the Philippines Press, 1997). She is the editor of the new anthology N ot Home, But Here: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora (Anvil, 2003). Luisa's work has appeared in numerous national and international journals, including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Span, Ruptures, Bomb , and Black Warrior Review . Luisa has received two Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as fellowships to the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and to Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She was a finalist in the 2003 Larry Levis Editors Prize Competition for Poetry ( Missouri Review ), and also in the 2002 New Letters Poetry Prize Competition. In 2001 she received a Fiction Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She has taught with the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently an associate professor on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program and the English Department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Raymond Torio Calbay: I just turned twenty and am taking the challenge of the writing life step by step, though never surefooted. I graduated last year with a BA in Literature from the University of Santo Tomas. I was a member of the Thomasian Writers Guild and served as editor for The Flame , the school's humanities journal. Presently, I work as a technical writer for Trend Micro , a computer software company. I also contribute short stories to the literary supplement of PM Sunday, a local tabloid. The poem I entered in the contest was inspired by a friend's emotional breakdown. I had hoped it to be a get-well prayer for her to gather herself back and face Life with a bolder heart.

Tala Kernan's "bio" is written by her very proud grandfather, playwright Bert Florentino: Tala Kernan, now 12, debuts as a poet (among adults) in The Philippine Womens University coffeetable book edition of Our Own Voice Cyberspace E-zine (Eds. Reme Grefalda & Nadine Sarreal). She plays a ($5000) cello in an orchestra and a quartet ensemble. Tala wrote this poem after the launching of her chapbook (with her sister Amihan) in 1997. They have been learning ballet and have had student recitals (also in flamenco, tap, etc.). Both have been reading furiously (after reading 43 titles at ages 7-9); they now read Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude . Both now wear thick eyeglasses (as their own mother at an early age.)