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This year's guest judge, writer and critic Lucy Ives, chose the manuscript Glaring by Benjamin Krusling as the winner of our inaugural open reading period, to be published in Spring 2020.
Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.
Writes Lucy Ives: Glaring is a beautiful and pleasurable, brilliant collection, combining energies of various modernisms with elegant maneuverings through the bleak media of contemporary America. Concerned with institutions—health, school, race, sports, police, family, money, history—as well as the shifting fortunes of affection and the self, these poems utterly transform two other well-worn institutions: the lyric and the page. Every line in this indelible book was my favorite.
Benjamin Krusling (b. 1990, Cincinnati) is the author of a chapbook, GRAPES (Projective Industries, 2018) and a text-image project, I have too much to hide (forthcoming from Triple Canopy, 2020). Prose and poems have appeared in Hyperallergic, The New Inquiry, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Territory, The Recluse, Washington Square Review, and Tagvverk—and work has been awarded the Sonora Review Poetry Prize in addition to Pushcart Prize nominations. He has been awarded the Amiri Baraka scholarship from Naropa University and supported by residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Blue Mountain Center. His work has been anthologized in the Bodies Built for Game anthology of contemporary sports writing and presented at The Poetry Project, The Kitchen, the Segue Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House and other venues. Benjamin received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship and a postgraduate Provost’s Visiting Writer fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn.
Photo by An Duplan -
About the Open Reading Period
Our open reading period solicits submissions of innovative, hybrid, and cross-genre work that charts new possibilities and expressions of poetic form.
Submissions for our next reading period open in July 2020.
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