A strong group of shortlisted poets this month, many, if not all, deeply talented in different genres and all examining the human condition in important and moving ways. Which poem speaks to you the most?
- Tim Dwyer, ‘Unexpectedly’: a poem written in the confinement of illness where in a moment a series of events happen that feel symbolic and a catalyst to healing
- Susan Elizabeth Hale, ‘Cup’: celebrates the ordinary – words that anchor us and stop us thinking about being broken, frozen and alone in the night when the sound of a long familiar voice is gone.
- Christtie Jay, ‘Petition For The Woman Formerly Known As My Mother’: beautifully holds the tension between petition, commemoration and grief
- Karina Jutzi, ‘Lot’s Wife’: a speaker that rebels while appearing to follow the ‘rules’ simply by virtue of being, witnessing and asking questions.
- Sophie Lankarani, ‘Dear Iran’: a narrator searching for her heritage and identity in the richness of her grandmother’s stories and the spices of the market.
- Seán Street, ‘Candlelight’: a poem that transitions beautifully between the concepts of flame, to matter and more solid objects, to escaping form.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Zakia or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
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THE APRIL 2026 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Along the lough
the first ferry in daylight
skims silently by
A strange bird
with brilliant markings
soars by my window—
I imagine a miracle
that carries illness away.
Tim Dwyer’s debut collection, Accepting The Call (templarpoetry.com), has won the Straid Collection Award. His Japanese form and longer poetry appears in Irish, UK and international journals and anthologies. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, he now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland.
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Cup
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
It’s more a word like window
or fenêtre
even curtain
words that are more certain,
that have weight on the tongue
that you feel through the teeth
puffs of air
that set off plosives in the mouth
Rilke was right
we are on this Earth to say
fountain
Sometimes it’s the sound of a voice
you’ve heard for seventy-four years
or since 8th grade
a sound that sets something in motion
like a harp string plucked
a name like Susanna
or Ian,
names that have origin in the body
that rise and generate
names that find you through the night
When words like broken
frozen
alone
stretch too far on the horizon
we need a word like cup
to bring us in from the cold
American ex-pat, Susan Elizabeth Hale has found her home in Ledbury and is a member of the Stanza Hereabouts. She has been published here and there and won third place in the Winchester Writer’s poetry competition in 2018. She is completing her first book.
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Petition For The Woman Formerly Known As My Mother
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons. Temper justice
with mercy. Let her forget
the wrong men, sharp belts, winters
with no oil in the tank, how to stretch
a pound until it weeps. Let her forget
grocery lists, swollen ankles, recipes,
how to turn salt into supper, all she gave
so I could be ungrateful. Let her forget
shame: every vowel it borrows, that house
that broke her hips, the three children
who stretched her body, deciding in month eight
our arms were no good. Let her forget the years
that folded her like linen, the plastic kindness
of nurses who call her sweetheart because
everyone forgets names. My Lord, she drank
your will like wine, wore Sundays like perfume.
I appeal, spare her the hallway that leads nowhere.
One more lucid hour where I am her
girl. Where the fog lifts for the sun to find her
face. Where she’s not holding the sky up or patient.
Christtie Jay is a storyteller whose work explores themes of memory, loss, and survival. Her writing has appeared on Prairie Schooner, BBC Radio, Lighthouse, A Long House, The Rumpus, among others. She is the author of the poetry album Grey Choir.
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Lot’s Wife
I think today of the boy in choir class
who closed his eyes when we sang
about Jesus. Who swayed, as if the Lord
himself was in the room.
I sat in the back row and braided
my girlfriend’s hair. Men are allowed
to worship each other. To bow down
at the feet of fellow men. But not to touch them.
They stand shoulder to shoulder,
eyes forward, staring at the same thing.
Women, on the other hand,
must also save their worship for men,
but their touches can go wherever they
damn well want to put their fingers.
The boy told me the story of
Lot’s nameless wife.
Who turned into a pillar of salt,
because she was disobedient.
Why not Ketchup, I said
Why not butter?
But I was missing the point,
which was: These are the rules of men,
follow them.
Karina Jutzi is a multi-genre writer whose work meets at the intersection of art and spirituality. Her poetry, plays, essays, and comedy writing have been featured in various literary magazines and publications. The main themes in her work are death, birth, and anything that peers into the void. She currently lives on a small farm in Vermont with her husband and young children.
*
Dear Iran
after Sholeh Wolpé
Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,
drifting out of the steam of her afternoon tea
searching for a place to land.
You slipped in from the clatter of spoons
against crystal tea glasses,
from the rustle of pistachios in a bowl,
from the smell of warm barbari bread.
You crawled across the living room rug
with its deep red blossoms,
and settled in the hollow of my throat
like an unfinished sentence.
I thought you were gold, Tehran,
and pomegranate-red, bursting with juice,
spice merchants crushing saffron threads
between their fingertips,
the air thick with sumac and smoke
and the hum of bargaining voices.
I dream of you, Tehran, I dream
every night with the ache
of someone trying to read
a language she was never taught.
I searched for you in the slope of my nose,
the olive of my skin.
But I cannot come to you.
You stay sealed behind headlines and rumors,
across news screens and phone calls,
behind the constant warning
“Not now. It’s not safe.”
And so you live inside me instead
a place I carry like a hidden heirloom,
glimmering in the dark.
A city I cannot visit
but that pulls at me anyway,
calling my name
like a prayer in a language I don’t understand
but somehow already know.
Sophie Lankarani is an Iranian-American writer whose poetry explores inheritance, displacement, and memory through Persian imagery and landscape. Her work reflects on cultural fracture, migration, and belonging.
Note: This poem was recently selected as the First Place Winner of the Sherry Pruitt Award by the North Carolina Poetry Society, and will be published in their Pinesong anthology.
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Candlelight
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
and still be Paris, stood there
awhile as the dark fire
caught, aspiring to spirit,
then turned as the dusk church rang
with candles, remembering
beers and salades gourmand
in the streets by the Sorbonne
held by a small fountain of light
that became the pole star
for this blank page, and which
as far as I know burns still
as high as Paris can go,
and Sacre Coeur, escaping
like you the prison of shape
through this small portal, glows white.
Seán Street’s latest is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, 2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, as well as a number of studies of sound poetics, the latest of which, wWild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong as published by Bloomsbury, (paperback edition in May, 2025.) Previous prose includes The Poetry of Radio, The Memory of Sound and The Sound of a Room, published by Routledge. He has worked in audio production for more than 50 years and lives in Liverpool. He is emeritus professor at Bournemouth University.