THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE
OCTOBER 2020We are pleased to announce that Anne Haven McDonnell is runner-up for The Hopper Poetry Prize for her manuscript Breath on a Coal.
Breath on a Coal is filled with unique and captivating poems, and they hung together quite well thanks to the author’s clear vision. This lyrical collection moves across and through the environment, starting with the powerful opening poem that establishes a legacy of environmental presence, change, and potential crisis. And this being-in-place moves into meditations on queer identity, love and loss of family and the beloved, and the meanings of home and friendship in this rapidly changing world. While so often steeped in vivid naturalistic detail, this manuscript has lovely forays into the more surreal and imaginative.
—The Hopper Editors
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM, and teaches as an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her work won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize, second place for the 2019 international Gingko Prize for Ecopoetry, and second place for the Narrative Magazine’s Twelfth Annual Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Living with Wolves is just out with Split Rock Press. Anne holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Enjoy a poem from Breath on a Coal below.
The Woman Who Held a Fish in Her Hands
I was the first to see them—
in a small creek crossing toward the river below,
two trout hovering side by side, their tails
barely swaying, side fins fanning
to keep still in the slow current
of that shallow pool. I read once, with awe
and envy, about a man who caught
fish with his hands. Maybe I remembered this,
maybe it was the amber-lit pool, or the sun
glancing in green and silver dots, darkening to red
at their bellies. I slung off my pack in the pines,
lay my belly on the earth, moved my arms
so slowly, they could have been shadows
of branches sighing. My breath slow as
—fingertips, fingers, hand, wrist, arm—
I let the water know me first, my pale skin
magnified in the river’s lens, my hand
when it slid under the belly of that trout
was still for a long time. Then it slowly rose
and touched the fish, as the current would.
There was no sudden yank or pull as I lifted
the fish gently in my hands, then held it tight,
shocked to see its slick body, gills and mouth
gasping in the broken air. So soon I knelt,
lowered it back in the pool where it shot
upstream, splashing air and water like a spark.
I didn’t think then how those two had muscled
and thrashed up that little creek to spawn
in the shallow pool—in my fierce desire
to touch, how my hand had come down to stop them.