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The Bordighera Poetry Prize

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Winner of the 2004 Bordighera Poetry Prize:
Sponsored by the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation
Carolyn Guinzio for West Pullman

1st Runner-up was Paola Corso for

The Laundress Catches Her Breath

From West Pullman III. | VII. | From The Flightless Rail

Carolyn Guinzio (also known as Carolyn Koo) was the 2004 winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize. She has published poems in Bloomsbury Review, Chimera Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Luna, New American Writing, Octopus, and Willow Springs among other venues. Her manuscript has been a finalist for numerous first book awards, including the Crab Orchard, Four Way Books, Sarabande, Slope Editions, Hollis Summers and Web Del Sol Prizes. West Pullman from Bordigehra Press will be her first full length book. She has published a chapbook titled Told in Real Time under the auspices of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and edited a magazine titled, No Roses Review under her former, married name, Carolyn Koo. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College and has received awards from the Fund for Poetry, The Illinois Arts Council, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She currently resides in Fayetteville, Arkansas with her husband, the poet Davis McCombs, and their children, Warren and Charlotte. Donna Masini, who served as Distinguished Poet Judge for 2003-2004, wrote of Carolyn Guinzio’s poetry saying: "It's a quiet, contemplative voice, a sense of mystery and interiority, a world of nighttime and basements and waiting, that draws me to Carolyn Guinzio's poems. These are spare, plain-spoken lyrics, pieces of story, characters and speakers who stop mid-step to listen ‚and what they are listening to we have only glimpses of. "What happens when we press so close to the unfamiliar?" Guinzio asks, and as she presses, we can feel her lean into what haunts her." Sample poems from Carolyn Guinzio’s prize winning manuscript West Pullman follow below: The Bordighera Poetry Prize was founded by Daniela Gioseffi and Alfredo de Palchi, a trustee of The Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation, in 1997. www.ItalianAmericanWriters.com/prize.html/

Sample poems by Carolyn Guinzio follow:

from West Pullman

III.

 From where they waited
in the triangle of space
behind the basement way door,
none of the nine could know
if the sky was still green,
if the taut strain of the lilacs and oak
had straightened,
or stopped, still bent.
What happens when we press
so close to the unfamiliar?
The fifth child, at seven years,
canít turn for the guard
of her brothers
and thinks: In the beginning,
the world and I were one.
In the beginning, even the trees
grew from my palms.
It was I who offered
to release the keys
to the air, heavy place
of my breath,
before demanding them back
to take root.
They were the first to leave me,
and I will be the last.

[First published in the Denver Quarterly]

VII.

One small night
in what might be the middle
of history, helicopters floated
low over West Pullman,
searching the streets for Sheila.
Down Princeton, up Harvard,
down Yale; and slow,
in its faint shadow, the car
with a police megaphone:
[red jacket, blue shoes.]
And it was for this
that light finally poured from the sky,
beams that could burrow through steel,
like the bright-pointed star
we all waited for, calling "Sheila."
Red jacket, blue shoes,
and a delicate neck
in the dark, billowing
and not held.
How many things ended
that night, and yet,
Sheila was buried
with forty-five words
in the back of the Monday Metro.
Then it was quiet again for a while.

[First appeared in Colorado Review]

from the Flightless Rail

Guam's Caution


This is what happens
from letting them go:
First, a clotting,
ungodly, of the understory.
A severing of air and color.
What falls dead, shrub or bird,
will turn into the grey
abundance. Spiders
in chandelier lattices cross,
filling the gaps between trees.
There will be no stopping
what passes being stopped.
We are alone and need
every part of ourselves.
We are meant to see
into the water,
into the sky between leaves.
These were two of our many
blue things. Spiders
fatten, listening
with their feet.

[First appeared in The Bardian]
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Copyright © 2004 by Carolyn Guinzio from West Pullman, forthcoming from Bordighera Press, 2005.

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