Bren Simmers

I am thrilled to win the long poem prize alongside co-winner Domenica Martinello. Our poems will be published in the summer issue of The Malahat Review. Here’s what the judges had to say about my poem: “‘Cloud Études’ offers poetry as shelter. As tool, home, sustenance. Where do we live when our body, our ‘pitched I’ fails us? What are we left with when memory evaporates? This poet works into the tall strata of the page to draw language into new conditions. What lives below—the long, flowing, sentence-level life filled with uncertainty and loss—lends itself to the distilled shapes above. The known inverts with the unknown. Reconstituted language shows us ‘clarity’s sparse address.’

Wisp by wisp, page by open page, ‘Cloud Études’ is an exquisitely-crafted and explored navigation of the value of poetic practice, a poem that shows us the fertile space within and above our lives, how to take cover in meaning-making ‘worthy of the hours.'”

Read more about the process of writing the poem here: “A Rhythmic Contrast: Karla Hirsch interviews Bren Simmers”

Photo of Summer Lake, Oregon, where this poem was originally recorded in the fall of 2017.