THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE
OCTOBER 2020We are pleased to announce that Kristin Dykstra has received honorable mention for The Hopper Poetry Prize for her manuscript Dissonance / Its Ridgelines.
What a fascinating manuscript and project—a deep dive into locality and a particular embeddedness in place through exploration of multiple voices and convergence even in dissonance. This manuscript keeps readers turning the pages, because every page deepens the work and brings something new. From the opening meditation on foothills to the later explorations of ice and snow, and more, this text evokes a sense of being-there and being-with that might arguably be one of the most important things environmental writing could achieve.
—The Hopper Editors
Other selections from Kristin Dykstra’s new poetry manuscript are forthcoming in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion and Seedings. She was recently featured at the June 2020 Words Without Borders Translator Relay. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Finalist for the National Translation Award. It was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, which also brought out Materia Prima, an anthology of poetry by Amanda Berenguer (Finalist, 2020 Best Translated Book Award) co-edited by Dykstra with Kent Johnson. Previously the University of Alabama Press published four of Dykstra’s book-length translations of Cuban poetry. Enjoy a poem from Dissonance / Its Ridgelines below. Where the north lies. Northern New England lies mostly within 100 miles of an external border. Do you reside in a hundred-mile zone. Maybe so, like two-thirds of the nation. You do! O numerous presence welcome home, bienvenu aux your portion of the twenty-first century. Reside within laws strewn across your hundred miles. Poke holes through their layers, head for the hills. Witness the frantic creation of vulnerabilities. Figures fabricate vague threats above borderscapes, figures aching for the Cold-War world quest for the best bipolar clash. These gathering clouds. Their concrete funded outcomes. How many newly hired agents? A ballooning glare out of sight yet nearby, the grail called forth from billows of fantasy. Now hiring. The center operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. All those jobs, they sparkle. Now hiring. To grasp at some people. Hands gesture. Under-documented official hands, rapidly withdrawn from sight. Checkpoints appear and disappear, they are concretely cloudy. The smell of caged children travels. Leaves here go on filtering sky and indignities. Everywhere the agents multiplied across our time. What dreams endure a childhood?
