NATIONAL POETRY OF THE MONTH FESTIVAL
Thank you to every single poet who entered this 100-poem festival. After a full adjudication process using multiple judging criteria that took several weeks of reading, rereading, and re-rereading, the following poems represent the strongest work of the festival. CONGRATULATIONS to the following winners, with Charlotte Puddifoot getting top honors of April Poem of the month: (also scroll down to see special awards)
GRAND PRIZE — POEM OF THE MONTH
1st: "Confessions of a Baby Snatcher" Charlotte Puddifoot: The single most accomplished poem in the pool. It earns its disturbing title and never wastes a line. The central consciousness, an infertile woman, grief-deranged, navigating hospitals, malls, and playgrounds, is rendered with devastating phenomenological precision.
2nd: "Wilderness" Gary Radice: A structural masterpiece, three-part, dual-timeline, formally strict. The parallel quatrains between 1991 and 2021 are devastating in their economy.
2nd: "I Remember When I Prayed" Susan Ashley: A survivor poem of real sonic and emotional violence. The praying/preying pun is earned, not gimmicky.
CATEGORY AWARDS
1. BEST FORMAL EXPERIMENT
Winner: "Wilderness" Gary Radice. The triptych structure with dual timelines and the documentary voice.
Runner-up: "I Remember When I Prayed" Susan Ashley: The deliberate, scored white space inside lines ("I lie awake now / as my heartbeat hammers") functions as a formal notation for traumatic dissociation. This is genuine structural thinking, not decoration.
2. BEST NARRATIVE POEM
Winner: "Wilderness" Gary Radice: A fully realized narrative across three movements, thirty years, and multiple perspectives, compressed into a lyric frame.
Runner-up: "Cans in his Hands" Rich Arsenault Straightforward but honest. The Beer Store narrator's observation of the homeless man is rendered with sociological specificity and genuine moral discomfort.
3. BEST LYRIC / MEDITATIVE POEM
Winner: "Confessions of a Baby Snatcher" Charlotte Puddifoot Technically submitted as a lyric, and that's what it is, an extended interior monologue in which the external world (hospital, mall, park) is always filtered through acute psychological distortion.
Runner-up: "You Are the One" Ashley Lippert: A tender, three-part mother elegy with genuine sensory specificity — "piano keys rippling into a gentle moan," "a moth with charm flushed / in a wind of calm gaze."
4. BEST POLITICAL / SOCIAL CONSCIENCE POEM
Winner: "I'm Not Ashamed" Savanna Jones: The most fully argued and emotionally honest political poem in the pool.
Runner-up: "You Have Chosen Your Side" Ashley Lippert: Powerful subject and a genuinely cumulative rhetorical structure.
5. BEST LOVE OR INTIMACY POEM
Winner: "You Are the One" Nette Onclaude: Not a conventional love poem, it's a love poem to a dead mother, filtered through sensory memory (the hyacinth scent, the piano keys, the porcelain mirror).
Runner-up: "Remembering When" Frederic Parker: A memory-of-love lyric with some genuinely beautiful textures — "love was you and I was a flame," the "tender tendrils" on the starry hill.
6. BEST NATURE / ECOPOEM
Winner: "Spring Walk" Ken Allan Dronsfield: A formal sonnet, and a competent one. The Shakespearean structure is correctly handled; the imagery is well-chosen, cherry petals as snow, finches as hidden choirs, the brook telling the reeds.
Runner-up: "The Great-tailed Grackle" Uncle Bob J Three lines. The grackle "strutting in the loud sun cackling / his dark, mad secrets" is an image with real surprise.
7. BEST HUMOR / SATIRE / WIT
Winner: "The Fly" David Crandall: The funniest and most formally satisfying comic poem in the pool. The question "Did I kill his mom?" is Sternean in its comic logic.
Runner-up: "Just Desserts" Jan Allison The spoonerism poem is effective: the embarrassment is well-paced, the resolution satisfying, and the lesson ("be careful what you say") is delivered with a wink.
Honorable mention: "Blowing a Raspberry" Douglas Gillies The philosophical question — does a fart become a burp when you're upside down? It is genuinely funny, and the poem commits to its absurdist premise without blinking.
8. BEST SHORT POEM (10 lines or fewer)
Winner: "The Great-tailed Grackle" Uncle Bob G: Three lines. "The great-tailed grackle / struts in the loud sun cackling / his dark, mad secrets." The compression is total, the image is exact.The best haiku in the contest.
Runner-up: "Inspired by Green Tea by Leonora Carrington" Laurentine G: (first stanza) The opening four-line unit, "when the plug is pulled / some of us will drain / others remain tethered / left contorting in pain" .
9. BEST SONIC TEXTURE
Winner: "I Remember When I Prayed" Susan Ashley The poem is built on sound: "blood polka-dotted / a white floor that smeared an inkblot of me," "lingual lava flow," "moonshine abuses," "counted moons and contusions," "battered forget-me-not / shattered his bones with buck-shot scatter." The consonantal clusters are purposeful, violence made phonological.
Runner-up: "Confessions of a Baby Snatcher" Charlotte Puddifoot: "Plashed your pearlescence," "stubbornly adhesive, leeching new life," "synaesthetic playground: / blood bursts of poppy, fire flames of freesia" The poem's sonic register is consistently inventive and controlled.
10. BEST NEW POET
(Eligible poets are those who joined within the last 12 months and declared their join date.)
Winner: "Princess of the Gun's Barrel"Florence Bondarenko: — Joined January 18, 2026. The love poem set at a wedding reception, with the Socrates-quoting suitor whose name isn't Stavros, shows real narrative instinct and a sensory specificity above average for a new poet. The "heartbeats against my chest like stray bullets" connecting to the title's Gun's Barrel is subtly accomplished. The poem has genuine originality of premise.
Runner-up: "Blowing a Raspberry" Douglas Gilles — Joined January 2026 Committed, funny, structurally consistent. Shows a distinct comic voice and genuine observational pleasure. "Jerusalem fartichokes" earns genuine admiration.
SPECIAL MENTIONS
Most Haunting Line: "barrenness occupies my bed; it is a womb-burrower, fattening stealthily on menstrual blood." — "Confessions of a Baby Snatcher" A line that is biologically specific, psychologically acute, and utterly unforgettable. The personification of barrenness as an interior parasite is genuinely disturbing and original.
Most Original Image: "lines of scabs formed sleeves of braille" — "Two Sons" (DHR) An image that does enormous compressed work: self-harm, secrecy, communication, texture, silence. The idea that wounds become a kind of language only the body can read is devastating.
Best Title: "Confessions of a Baby Snatcher" The title does what every great title should: it creates immediate unease, makes a demand on the reader, and then the poem delivers something far more complex and human than the title implies. It refuses easy sympathy while earning profound empathy.
Best Ending: "Wilderness" (DHR) "this parents' path is hard and long." — Simple, final, unbearable. The understatement after the poem's structural complexity is exactly right. No other ending in the pool comes close.
Judge's Choice: "Two Sons" (DHR) This is the riskiest poem in the pool, dense with theological language, Calvinist election doctrine, Rembrandt, Job, Jonah, Galilee, and it nearly collapses under the weight. But the central image constellation (the son's addiction, the self-harm as braille, the inpatient stays as chemical salvation, the father's terrified prayer) is genuinely original.
CONGRATULATIONS