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FOOL FOR POETRY
ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
New Irish Voices
Liberty Walks Naked
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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Maya Catherine Popa is completing an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University under a Clarendon Scholarship, and an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she has studied under Sharon Olds. She co-leads a weekly writing workshop for veterans of Iraq & Afghanistan and is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast's "Women in the World". Her writing appears in The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, The Rumpus, The American Literary Review, Locuspoint, The Huffington Post,and elsewhere. Follow Popa on Twitter @MayaCPopa.
3rd Prize in the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition
Sashimi
I served my loves' sashimi hearts on iceless beds of clean bamboo. Some were tasteless, others, spoiled at the oil-rig of our departure. There was the horse-mackerel bucking at the rice, as if another life were to await. The wheel-shrimp hugging his white station like a pillow, the koi promising to love each grain. I knew the knife-work it had taken to get here, the hands, my hands, unfolding origami nerves, widening fields between modest fish lungs. I could smell blood on the stone floor, heard a bell that signaled the start of an auction. I plucked and plucked at another urchin's stitches as my own heart shivered on the scale.
©2013 Maya Catherine Popa
Judge's Statement
In third place is ‘Sashimi’, a real peach of a short lyric, a masterpiece in painted miniatures. Cold as a fish, this narrator serves minimal portions of emotion ‘on iceless beds of clean bamboo’. Here are seven observations compressed into a single poetic serving, but only after the superb knife-work of thought. Here is a dismembering of attachment, but with the hope of further bloody attachment as the bell signals the start of another auction. Ultimately, it is the narrator’s heart that shivers. This is a clean-cut, tightly organised, lyric; a poem that shows great skill and linguistic, as well as culinary, expertise. It is, quite simply, beautiful.
Author Links
Five poems by Maya Catherine Popa at New York City Poets 'He Called His Penis John Wayne. He Lied': article by Popa at The Huffington Post Review of Craig Morgan Teicher by Popa at The Rumpus
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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