Forward Prizes for Poetry ふぉわーどししょう
Edition 27 (2018)
Winners
3 peopleDon't Call Us Dead begins by imagining a place where Black boys are freed from violence, then turns police brutality, anti-Blackness, queerness, HIV, the body, and death into poetry. Anger and mourning are joined by humor, prayer, and a fierce desire for life.
A collection that renames those called dead as alive somewhere else.
Shrines of Upper Austria follows a traveller through central Europe, layering lakes, folk culture, postwar memory, immigrants, and children's voices. Personal history and the history of place echo in fragments, placing shrines and unsettling discoveries within the same landscape.
A record of travel quietly reconnects family history with European memory.
The Republic of Motherhood treats becoming a mother as a border crossing, compressing body, joy, fear, solitude, and intimacy into a brief sequence of poems. The title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, making motherhood resonate not only as private experience but as a language of community and transformation.
A pamphlet that sings motherhood as the transformation of entering a new country.