Melissa Morphew Wins the 2010 SPC Poetry Book Contest

The winner of the 2010 Sacramento Poetry Center Manuscript Contest is Melissa Morphew for her manuscript Bluster, which our final judge Indigo Moor has just selected as the winner.

Here's some of what Indigo had to say: "My choice is Bluster because of lines such as:
; he cups
a drunken bee in his hand, puts it to her ear—
loovvvvvvvvvve—
uncups the bee, palm unstung;
love, love, the word throbs her wrist, a razor cut,
but this is retrospect

and

If there is a flower breaking
from the wall, breaking,
the stone cleaved, the petals
cleaved from the marble,
surprised by such blooming,
such fecundity in the midst
of barren rock

“Bluster often startled me. The line breaks and form choices were exacting and somehow puckish. Consistently, I was kept off guard by the prospect of what I would find."

Melissa Morphew is a graduate of the University of Georgia's PhD program in English. Morphew is the recipient of several national and international poetry prizes, including: The Academy of American Poets College Prize, The Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, The Cecil J. Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, The W.B. Yeats' Society Poetry Prize, and several Pushcart Prize nominations. In 2006, her full-length collection of poems, Fathom, was published by Turning Point Press. Morphew's poems can be found in the pages of the most respected U.S. literary journals. Her work has been included in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, TX.