The Waywiser Press

06/12/2024

Looking for the perfect solstice gift for your favorite literary elf? It's always the season for Waywiser Poetry!

Julia Hungry is a communion and reckoning with form—a female poet’s apprenticeship to the male-dominated canon of twentieth century verse, part love-affair and part fencing match with its forebears. Inherited forms are intact almost to a fault but flooded with femininity as if in an attempt to r...

27/11/2024

The Folger Shakespeare Library may have missed an opportunity by not naming its new eatery As You Like it Cafe (as we suggested), but a cafe by any other name still looks as sweet. Quill & Crumb (that name got the most votes in a public call for ideas) opens tomorrow in the newly renovated

27/11/2024

27/11/2024

This year’s Hecht Prize judge, Shane McCrae, wants to read your first or second collections of poetry! Deadline approaching fast (Dec 1): https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

26/11/2024

From the 20TH ANNUAL ANTHONY HECHT POETRY PRIZE JUDGE, SHANE MCCRAE:

Posted • Y’all, I am so, so stoked to be judging Waywiser’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Both Hecht and Waywiser mean an awful lot to me. The deadline for the Prize is coming up, so send me your manuscript while you can! I wanna read it! https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

21/11/2024

“We expect great things from winners of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.” —Josh Brewer, Harvard Review

Could your poetry manuscript be the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner? Not if you don’t submit, so don’t forget to submit today! Win $3000, publication (which includes a foreword by the judge—Shane McCrae), AND a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library with the judge. SUBMIT, AND SHARE THE INFO!

https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

The 16th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, selected by Vijay Seshadri, was Danielle Blau’s critically acclaimed (named to Lambda Literary’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature list and reviewed in the The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), McSweeney’s, Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Review) debut, PEEP:

“peep is a tour de force, and it’s more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it’s imaginative and bold; but it’s also intimate. If I were asked to account for this intimacy, especially in the face of all the other effects that Blau realizes, I might say, diffidently, that Blau is the performer of her own experience, but she is also its scholar and critic….
“Though her flexible diction is present-day, though she has a gender-specific savviness and élan that probably wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of the twenty-first century (or thereabouts), though she’s street-wise, nothing in her work is just contemporary, nothing is independent of anything else. As hip as she is, she’s also a throwback to the Romantic vocation of organic form. All her effects are emanations of the fullness with which her sensibility inhabits language and the confident way her imagination takes possession of her experience.” — from Vijay Seshadri’s foreword

21/11/2024

We’re celebrating two decades of Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winners; could you and your manuscript join them? SUBMIT BY DECEMBER 1!

Below, read 18th judge Linda Gregerson on 18th winner Hannah Louise Poston—and this year’s judge, Shane McCrae, on Poston’s marvelous debut as well:

Pleasure is here aplenty in the pages of this marvelous debut, pleasure in the full spectrum of poetry’s musical and figurative enchantments. What keeps me coming back to the poems, however, is not only their lyrical accomplishment, impressive as that may be. No. What keeps me coming back is the amplitude and sheer good company of the author’s agile mind. — from Linda Gregerson’s foreword

Hannah Louise Poston startles her readers into understanding even their most basic perceptions newly—in the kitchen,” she writes, ‘it smells like old pears / as if a thumb pressed gently on the surface of the air / would poke a fissure through to warm rot,’ and one feels as if one for the first time understands smell. But perhaps more important than that particular understanding is the awareness of the unification of senses—in the simile, the sense of smell and the sense of touch—one derives from the lines. In Julia Hungry, Poston’s is a unifying vision—not naively so, but in response to a world of discontinuities. Julia Hungry is a healing book that makes its wound. — Shane McCrae

https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com

19/11/2024

"We expect great things from winners of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize." —Josh Brewer, Harvard Review

Could your poetry manuscript be the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner? Not if you don’t submit, so don’t forget to submit today! Win $3000, publication (which includes a foreword by the judge—Shane McCrae), AND a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library with the judge. SUBMIT, AND SHARE THE INFO!

https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

The 16th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, selected by Vijay Seshadri, was Danielle Blau's critically acclaimed (named to Lambda Literary’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature list and reviewed in the The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), McSweeney's, Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Review) debut, PEEP:

“peep is a tour de force, and it’s more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it’s imaginative and bold; but it’s also intimate. If I were asked to account for this intimacy, especially in the face of all the other effects that Blau realizes, I might say, diffidently, that Blau is the performer of her own experience, but she is also its scholar and critic….
“Though her flexible diction is present-day, though she has a gender-specific savviness and élan that probably wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of the twenty-first century (or thereabouts), though she’s street-wise, nothing in her work is just contemporary, nothing is independent of anything else. As hip as she is, she’s also a throwback to the Romantic vocation of organic form. All her effects are emanations of the fullness with which her sensibility inhabits language and the confident way her imagination takes possession of her experience.” — from Vijay Seshadri’s foreword

12/11/2024

Could your poetry manuscript be the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner? Not if you don’t submit, so don’t forget to submit today! Win $3000, publication (which includes a foreword by the judge—Shane McCrae), AND a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library with the judge. SUBMIT, AND SHARE THE INFO!

https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

The 2nd annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, selected by Mary Jo Salter, was Erica Dawson’s incredible debut, BIG-EYED AFRAID:

In Big-Eyed Afraid, a first book of genuine originality, Erica Dawson turns the mirror held up to nature on herself. Both humorous and heart-wrenching, Dawson balances formal adroitness with a 21st-century colloquial idiom modulating between demotic and mandarin registers, a voice all her own. Employing numerous forms, including the rondeau, ballade, rhyme royal and her own adaptation of the In Memoriam stanza, Dawson elevates the self only to see it combust into pieces of broken character, an arch of introspection signaled by the book’s opening and ending series of nickname poems, including “Nappyhead,” “Mommy Dearest,” and “DrugFace,” where contradictions of personal, cultural, and intellectual identities are exposed. In between, Dawson completes the case history, calling on everyone from Freud and Puccini to Rita Hayworth and James Brown while craftily moving between rhyme’s mellifluous voice and that of a frighteningly self-effacing honesty: “…search high for your halo and penance / And a murder of crows and your birthday’s sentence.” Yet for every stanza spent in Dawson’s mind, each page of Big-Eyed Afraid opens up to face and find shade from reality’s “blue leaded sun burning its shine too strong.”

12/11/2024

Could your poetry manuscript be the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner? Not if you don't submit, so don't forget to submit today! Win $3000, publication (which includes a foreword by the judge—Shane McCrae), AND a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library with the judge. SUBMIT, AND SHARE THE INFO!

https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

The 2nd annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, selected by Mary Jo Salter, was Erica Dawson's incredible debut, BIG-EYED AFRAID:

In Big-Eyed Afraid, a first book of genuine originality, Erica Dawson turns the mirror held up to nature on herself. Both humorous and heart-wrenching, Dawson balances formal adroitness with a 21st-century colloquial idiom modulating between demotic and mandarin registers, a voice all her own. Employing numerous forms, including the rondeau, ballade, rhyme royal and her own adaptation of the In Memoriam stanza, Dawson elevates the self only to see it combust into pieces of broken character, an arch of introspection signaled by the book's opening and ending series of nickname poems, including "Nappyhead," "Mommy Dearest," and "DrugFace," where contradictions of personal, cultural, and intellectual identities are exposed. In between, Dawson completes the case history, calling on everyone from Freud and Puccini to Rita Hayworth and James Brown while craftily moving between rhyme's mellifluous voice and that of a frighteningly self-effacing honesty: "…search high for your halo and penance / And a murder of crows and your birthday's sentence." Yet for every stanza spent in Dawson's mind, each page of Big-Eyed Afraid opens up to face and find shade from reality's "blue leaded sun burning its shine too strong."

11/11/2024

Could your poetry manuscript be the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner? Not if you don't submit, so don't forget to submit today! Win $3000, publication (which includes a foreword by the judge—Shane McCrae), AND a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library with the judge. SUBMIT, AND SHARE THE INFO!

https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

Of the 1st annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, the judge, the late J. D. McClatchy, wrote:

Field Knowledge, Morri Creech's second collection, is a series of lyrical meditations on the limits and perils of knowledge, the beauty of experience and its inherent deceptions. Covering a breadth of subjects – from poems about his own family and the connections between local landscape and collective memory, to evocations of Giotto, Newton, and Primo Levi – Creech explores both the familiar world and its hidden mysteries. Many of the poems in this collection share with its predecessor an interest in theological subjects: here are dramatic monologues in the voices of Job and his wife, even an "Elegy for Angels". Other poems evoke both the mysteries and terrors of science, as when Oppenheimer first beholds "the radiant god, shatterer of worlds" in "In the Orchards of Science". Still others examine the cost of experience through a variety of historical and fictional characters, including Marvell's coy mistress, Simone Weil, and Rousseau. Ranging from the humorous to the elegiac, employing both free verse and structured formal stanzas, Creech's lush poems explore the sting of experience while luxuriating in "the honey of knowledge."

09/11/2024

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize contest closes December 1, 2024! This year's judge is Shane McCrae. The winner will receive a cash prize, have their book published by Waywiser next year, and read together with the judge at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC. Submit here: https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

A QUICK NOTE:

The Waywiser Press* is now accepting submissions for the TWENTIETH ANTHONY HECHT POETRY PRIZE, judged by SHANE MCCRAE and open to poets who have published no more than one previous collection.

Prize: $3,000 + publication by Waywiser + a reading with the judge under the auspices of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

Submit by December 1; for full guidelines and submission portal, please visit: https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

*Please note: Waywiser Press will transition to its successor organization, the US-based 501(c)(3) Waywiser Books, at the end of 2025. Details on this transition may be found here:

https://waywiser-press.com/announcing-a-new-chapter-for-waywiser/

01/10/2024

A QUICK NOTE:

The Waywiser Press* is now accepting submissions for the TWENTIETH ANTHONY HECHT POETRY PRIZE, judged by SHANE MCCRAE and open to poets who have published no more than one previous collection.

Prize: $3,000 + publication by Waywiser + a reading with the judge under the auspices of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

Submit by December 1; for full guidelines and submission portal, please visit: https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

*Please note: Waywiser Press will transition to its successor organization, the US-based 501(c)(3) Waywiser Books, at the end of 2025. Details on this transition may be found here:

https://waywiser-press.com/announcing-a-new-chapter-for-waywiser/

01/09/2024

The Waywiser Press* is now accepting submissions for the TWENTIETH ANTHONY HECHT POETRY PRIZE, judged by SHANE MCCRAE and open to poets who have published no more than one previous collection.

Prize: $3,000 + publication by Waywiser + a reading with the judge under the auspices of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

Submit by December 1; for full guidelines and submission portal, please visit: https://hechtprize.waywiser-press.com/

*Please note: Waywiser Press will transition to its successor organization, the US-based 501(c)(3) Waywiser Books, at the end of 2025. Details on this transition may be found here:

https://waywiser-press.com/announcing-a-new-chapter-for-waywiser/

09/07/2024

The organisers of this year’s UK Forward Prize have just written to say that a collection we submitted hasn’t advanced. Are we supposed to be comforted by what they say?

“The judges didn’t not take their decisions lightly.”