The first place award of $700 and publication in Peripheries Issue 7 for the inaugural Peripheries Poetry Competition goes to Aline Dolinh for her poem “Dream Sequence Stricken From a Tapestry.” Commenting on the poem, Josh Bell writes: “The odd blazing breadth of tone and diction here—britomartian to gorget, cellophaned to heft—is the announcement of an arrival, of a world coming into focus, the voice big and rolling but careful, local, specific. The poem is strange, funny, exhilarating. The world it moves through is frightening and grand. We might be punctured and we will be tested.”
Aline Dolinh is a writer and publishing worker who received her MFA in poetry from Boston University and currently lives in Somerville, MA. Her poems have appeared in underblong, The Rumpus, Passages North, RHINO, and Frontier Poetry, among other publications.
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The second place award of $400 and publication in Peripheries Issue 7 goes to Alan Yan for his poem “Impossible Blue.” Commenting on the poem, Josh Bell writes: “This love poem isn't a love poem as much as a poem about alienation, loneliness in a world more and more past tense. How to love while standing on ground which might not support us much longer? We're made of water in a world which is no longer promised water. The poet Alan Yan isn't sure we have time enough, as human beings, to discover what, exactly, the human being was and is.”
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Alan Yan is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY. His poems have appeared in The Westchester Review and in the anthology The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence. His haiku have appeared in Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, Presence, Kingfisher, NOON, and other journals.
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Finalists for this year's competition were: Esther Heller for “Barry & Glodean”; Kányin Olorunnisola for “the history of America. as told by beja.”; Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio for “Soup of the Day’; and Stacey Forbes for “Counting Snowflakes Will Not Help Me Sleep.”​
Available at Grolier Poetry Bookshop and Harvard University Press
digital issue available via HUP website
from Peripheries issue 6
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On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
-Seamus Heaney, The Given Note
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Ocean-exposed like the smallest Blasket:
Luanda’s isthmus, a northernmost hut,
And a sail staring out at it through the night.
They knew that was no crescent moon, had heard
Of others dragged into the white, their tune
Silver as shark and sword and loud weather,
As much a bleak code as a melody.
There was no preparing for it, an ear
Either knew it or not, nothing easy,
A continent turned into an island,
An island turned into pain. Take this thing,
They heard, this is your first violin.
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So whether they called it sacred music
Or not, I don’t know if I care. Here it
Was: the ancient-modern mid-Atlantic
Song of a somewhere turned into nowhere.
And nowhere to hide they listened gravely,
As an iron note inched closer on air.
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Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ next book of poems, Silver, will be published in March 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.