poetry

Scott Frey wins 2023 Tampa Review Poetry Prize

Image of a man with folded arms smiling into the camera.
Poet Scott Frey

Scott Frey has won the 2023 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection, Heavy Metal Nursing. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2024 by the University of Tampa Press. 

 Scott Frey grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy. He learned to teach and found his first writing community at The Landmark School. He then found a wonderful writers’ community during his years teaching at The Ethel Walker School. He also served as a parent advisor for the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Hospital, Boston. He and his wife run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses improve their quality of life.

Among other publications, he has work forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, One, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the 2023 Perkoff Prize for poetry. His prose chapbook, Night Nurses, was a winner in the 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.

Tampa Review judges praised Frey’s collection, stating:

“Heavy Metal Nursing tells a story of love, the poet Scott Frey’s love for his firstborn daughter. It is not a sentimental love but a “heavy-metal” one, complicated by the hard facts of his daughter’s life: she was born with a severe brain injury, needed intensive care her entire life, and died at three years old. This book is the work of a poet and a parent in equal measure. These are poems of vulnerability and pain, of course, but simultaneously of parenting, caregiving, marriage, medicine, humor, tenderness, affection. Frey brings poetic technique to bear on personal trauma, narrative on desolation, love on loss.”

Frey says, “This collection is an attempt to depict the mix of sorrow and wonder we lived with our daughter during her traumatic birth and medically complex life. Even when our days felt like long tunnels, we were surprised by the care and kindness of our communities. This helped shape our responses to her absence and our responses to the ways her presence continues in a way unknowable beforehand.

Many of the poems began as a method of reaching towards the nurses, doctors, therapists, friends, and family who offered to our daughter and to us such exquisite attention and dedication.

The struggle to craft these narrative lines gave me a way to distill the chaos and emotions roiling within many of our most haunting scenes and memories. It gave me a form for placing lines of grit and despair arm-to-arm with lines of laughter and joy.”

This year the judges also announced two finalists:

Bruised Light: Collected Father by John Pijewski

Miss La La and the Cirque Fernando by Gavin Moses

The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review. Submissions are now being accepted for 2024.

A Poem on the Death of Poetry by Jon Davis

Issue 65 of Tampa Review is off to the printer! To celebrate, we are sharing one of its featured poems, apropos of recent discussions on the death of poetry.

Jon Davis

Jon Davis is the author of six chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021) and Choose Your Own America (FLP, 2022). Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught for 28 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts and founded, in 2013, the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018. A new collection, Anathematica, is forthcoming from Grid Books in 2024.

After the Death of Poetry 

It was success that killed it. It had lived 
peacefully in the small village of its making 
for years. We’d see it occasionally, or pass 
an open door in summer where someone 
was standing at a podium and speaking 
in that way we recognized, and we would nod 
and continue on with our day, assured 
that it was surviving the way an endangered 
tortoise survives, lumbering the endless desert 
until it finds another tortoise, a small tuft 
of grass. Or we’d see a line of thin books 
in a bookstore, a stack of homely journals, 
and think, good, they’re still singing, this 
oddly plain species, from the treetops and hills. 
Their songs were not for everyone, knotted 
and braided as they were, but we liked 
that they were making and sharing them. 
If we thought bless their hearts, it was more 
to praise their devotions than to satirize them. 
But then, things began to change. Their songs 
got louder, simpler. They began appearing 
on buses and trains, on screens, sounding 
from street corners and bars and phones. 
At times they ranted, at times they wept. 
And an amazing thing happened: We started, 
slowly at first, to understand 
what they were saying. At last, we could stand 
and cheer and not worry that we’d 
missed the point. Yes, we thought, 
your father was mean! Yes, the police 
are brutal and, yes, racist! Yes, the yellow 
butterflies bring us peace. They are emblems 
of light and soulfulness and beauty. 
And, oh, the patriarchy of it all! And 
you loved your dog but he died. And 
that boyfriend truly was, as you say 
so pointedly, a bastard! Now we can 
grieve with you on this bus huffing 
and swaying down Fifth. We can hear you, 
brothers and sisters, as we wait 
for the DJ to arrive, the woman to tune 
her guitar. Soon, we understood, 
everyone is a poet. Every utterance, once 
spread across the page, a poem! Eventually, 
we could no longer tell what was poetry 
and what was talk. And that’s the way 
we wanted it. We realized that the poets 
had been making us feel inadequate. 
Even our unspoken contempt for them 
had been driven by our feelings of failure– 
to hear, to understand the complexity 
of their writings. Now that poetry was dead, 
really dead, we could finally enjoy it. 
But then a strange thing happened. We started 
missing it. The way you might miss a jungle 
you’d never visited, a mountain you’d 
only seen in photographs. We wandered 
the streets hoping to lean into a gallery 
and hear those cadences, those baffling 
metaphors, see the audience members turn 
to each other, sharing some secret, 
some mysterious companionship 
that made us envious. We missed 
ignoring them, missed knowing they 
were settling like a flock of sparrows 
into an elm at dusk, chirping softly 
as night filtered through the branches, sifting 
finally into the bones of those dark, drowsing birds. 

Colin Dodds

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NO PREDICTABLE MALFUNCTION

by Colin Dodds

The bar smelled like an ex-girlfriend’s breath.
And I was like Belgium in the 20th century—
just waiting for someone to violate my neutrality.

I had little room to maneuver;
the market of the heart
had been rebuilt for efficiency,

its work outsourced
and its meager glory distributed
to chromosomes, glands, and early sufferings.

The man next to me makes sense,
but only over long spans of time.
He spits a whole failed life onto my sleeve.

I cross the bridge alone at night,
howling and gesturing
like a failed sorcerer.

The moving parts
of my squalid heart lurch
according to no predictable malfunction.

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Colin DoddsColin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He’s the author of several novels, including Windfall and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” Dodds’ screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

William Greenway

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High Heaven

by William Greenway

                                                                     for Rosalee

                              He who loves give a hostage to fortune.
                                                                      —Nietzsche

Another stinking diaper to thank
God for, why we traveled all the way to Bethlehem,
Alabama, to get this,
slept in a crummy motel for a month waiting
for her to be born, mud-wrestled every bureaucrat
in the state, pressing inky fingers on every piece
of paper they sent to Montgomery, endured stares
and questions: “Is she colored?” the white maid asks—
a word I haven’t heard since my Georgia
cracker youth. Then another:
“But she’s a pretty little pickaninny.
And don’t ever cut her hair—
it’ll just make it kinky.”

We named her after Rosa Parks and Harper Lee.
The old man in the doctor’s office says,
“She gonna be a Coca-Cola redbone,”
a term we’re never heard.
“You better keep them boys away.”

Now, she’s crawling into every trouble there is,
and I remember why I’ve waited this long
for what I always feared:
loving something so much,
you could die from it, this joy
at the last, at sixty-six.

I always wondered what would “curdle the blood,”
but midway through the baby poem I swore
I’d never write, and halfway down
the hall, she’s trying to unplug the smoke
detector, and shrieking to high heaven, not
in pain, but simply because she’s found
her new voice, her own language,
and is already on her way, away.

============================================================================
William Greenway author photoWilliam Greenway’s tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection, Ascending Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series. His newest book, The Accidental Garden, is forthcoming from Word Press, and Selected Poems is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press, both in 2014. Greenway’s critical work, The Poetry of Personality: The Poetic Diction of Dylan Thomas, is forthcoming from Rowan and Littlefield in 2014. His publication credits include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer’s Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Greenway was named Georgia Author of the Year. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University.

William Greenway

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IN HEAVEN IT IS ALWAYS AUTUMN

by William Greenway

              after John Donne

It all seemed to happen that same year
we lived in England, every hill golden
with the turning beeches, crimson apples
in the orchard by our cottage
muted pink by the mist rising
off the river reflecting
the upside down
palette of it all.

In Italy, the vineyards
wore the yellow, plaited hair
of harvest, every barn breathing out
the warm crush and gush of grapes
like the winey kisses of a long
luncheon tryst.

Time
had stopped.
The change
we couldn’t see coming
stalled for a while,
an Indian summer before the stroke.

Had it happened while we were hiking
the paths of fallen leaves, miles
from help, we’d have thought, though
not said, we hoped for any afterlife
to rival this heaven—color box
of plum, ochre, cinnamon, lemon—
and the blood-red beauty of the dead
gone on before us.

============================================================================
William Greenway author photoWilliam Greenway’s tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection, Ascending Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series. His newest book, The Accidental Garden, is forthcoming from Word Press, and Selected Poems is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press, both in 2014. Greenway’s critical work, The Poetry of Personality: The Poetic Diction of Dylan Thomas, is forthcoming from Rowan and Littlefield in 2014. His publication credits include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer’s Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Greenway was named Georgia Author of the Year. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University.