THE 'DARK POETS PRIZE V'
RESULTS
We’re honoured to announce the results of Dark Poets Prize V.
With more than 4,000 poems submitted from 42 countries, this edition has confirmed what we have suspected since Prize I: the appetite for the dark, the uncomfortable and the unflinchingly honest has no ceiling.
This round did not simply go dark; it went everywhere at once. Poets reached for the sestina and the scream in equal measure. The range was staggering. The craft, relentless. More than once, a poem stopped us mid-read.
Judging was brutally difficult. Lines lodged beneath the ribs. Images followed us away from the desk and refused to leave. Every poet who placed in this edition of the Dark Poets Prize earned that recognition against a field that refused to make anything easy.
What follows are our winners, Shortlist and Honourable Mentions: the poems and poets that stayed with us long after the reading was done.
To everyone whose work appears in these pages, congratulations. You helped make this our largest and most difficult Prize yet.
❗️If your name is not here, please know this is not a verdict on your writing as a whole. The margins this year were razor-thin. Every poem was read in full and every final decision cost us something.
To every poet who entered: thank you. You trusted us with your darkness, and that matters. Keep writing. Keep excavating. Keep sending us what you are not meant to say out loud.
The next Dark Poets Prize is already in motion. In the meantime, keep an eye out for our next Mini Challenge.
Yours in darkness,
Dark Poets Club Editorial Team
Stay tuned for more updates as we celebrate the extraordinary talent within our community!
1ST 2ND & 3RD PLACE
"While I've been a prose writer all my writing life, working primarily in fiction, I've always secretly wanted to be a poet. I shied away from it only because someone in my life who is no longer alive told me poetry was self-indulgent. That said, my prose is often described as lyrical, and I rely on many strategies poets utilize such as alliteration and arresting imagery. In the MFA I attended, where poetry was emphasized, I was the oddball novelist, working hard to take the prompts and push them into worldbuilding and character development to create my novel, Fig (Simon & Schuster, 2015). But when I started teaching, I wanted to better understand the intricacies of how poetry works to be of any real use to my students working in verse. I had one particular student—an exceptionally gifted poet—who introduced me to the sestina, a form he was drawn to. I shudder to think how unhelpful my feedback must have been on the complex sestinas he turned in because I now know how little I understood the constraints. A few years later, while taking a class from the lovely Gabriela Denise Frank, I finally tried to write my own sestina under her patient guidance, and I am ecstatic to report that it just so happens to be "Her Body Now A Doll"! It is an understatement to say how validating this recognition is as I embrace myself as a poet at long last! (I have twenty-three poems written now toward a collection tentatively titled On the Balcony of Midnight which orbits my experience with girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, and now widowhood).
"Her Body Now A Doll" addresses difficult, and even taboo subject matters, and I cannot think of a more suitable home for it than The Dark Poets Club! I wrote the sestina after my oldest daughter died unexpectedly at only twenty-six; the shock and sorrow I knew then dangerously amplified my OCD, yet I found the sestina to be a container that could handle my obsessions, my ruminations, my intrusive thoughts, and the panic of being a woman and a mother to all girls. Under Gabriela's articulate and artful instruction, the genesis of the poem began with me listing all my obsessions: dolls, the Mad Woman in the Attic, witches, The Fall of Eve, rewilding, and the necropastoral landscapes that have always haunted me.
From there, I selected the six words I'd have to work to death (all pun intended). I cultivated and exhumed meaning from the repetition rather than redundancy, and leaning into narrative, through each turning of these six words, I twisted the story, and this mutation allowed the uncanny to bloom and decay from the field of the page. As a form, the sestina mimics the praying of a rosary, and into this specific rosary I alchemized acute grief into the act of mourning where healing begins. In "Her Body Now A Doll," I traced and chased the loop of generational trauma too many women know, and the keening allowed me to cast a liberation spell for both my ancestors and granddaughters to come."
~ Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
"I’m genuinely thrilled to have You Already Paid recognised with second place in Dark Poets Prize V. After being honoured in the Dark Humour, Bitter Irony Mini Challenge, coming back and placing in the main prize feels a little surreal. Dark poetry gives us somewhere to put the things that don’t become prettier just because we give them language. To have a piece like this read, understood, and recognised means more than I can comfortably fit into a quote. I’m incredibly grateful to the judges, and to Dark Poets, for continuing to make room for work that isn’t afraid of the difficult places."
~ S.D Gould (previous Winner of the 'Dark Humour, Bitter Irony' Mini Challenge)
"Placing third with the Dark Poets Club is a rite of passage that gave my graphic, controversial work a platform where darkness is celebrated, not just tolerated. Securing my first official placing in a poetry competition, after many years of writing, and countless rejections feels extremely gratifying. My poems build fictional worlds that turn my inner screams into whispers, delving into the underworld where others often tiptoe. I feel like I’ve stepped away from the collective identity as a casual writer and I feel like I’m returning to the writing community with a new status. My poem was sparked by sitting inside a church in York, England. I was intrigued by the interior, and how orderly it appeared. I wanted to manipulate that into something direct and unapologetic; paying attention to potent, religious imagery. This recognition has multiplied my confidence, and I’m proud to share the podium with another two members, as well as my unassuming demons: the forces I've grown accustomed to, who keep me busy and will likely remain firmly in business."
~ Elliot Chester
SHORTLIST + HONOURABLE MENTION:
Congratulations to all the incredible poets that participated and to those who made it into our 'Shortlist' + 'Honourable Mentions', whose stunning work has also been selected for publication on Dark Poets Club, (you will be contacted in due course):
FOR THOSE DIGITALLY SAVVY AND WISHING TO SHARE THEIR SHORTLIT OR HONOURABLE MENTION, FEEL FREE TO DOWNLOAD THE CLEAN IMAGE BELOW AND ADD YOUR NAME (BOLD FONT IS ANTON):
