Philip Booth Prize: 2021 Winners

We are thrilled to announce that this year’s guest judge, Matt Rasmussen, has chosen “Nepenthes Terrarium” by Rebecca Hawkes as the winner of the 2021 Philip Booth Poetry Prize. Rebecca receives $500 & publication in Salt Hill’s 46th issue, due out late summer.

The Philip Booth Poetry Prize was a joy to run this year, after a chaotic year’s hiatus. Over 200 poets submitted their work, which meant we received around 600 poems, so deliciously various and alive. Our team of readers compiled a longlist of 40 poems by 28 poets and passed them on to Matt for the final round of judging. Both the Salt Hill team and Matt read the poems blind.

Of the winning poem, Matt says:

There were many excellent poems submitted, but Rebecca Hawkes’s “Nepenthes Terrarium” somehow just struck me upon first encountering it. I read and reread the submissions and yet, I kept coming back to this poem’s careful balance of image and narrative and clever blending of humor and darkness.

The five other finalists, which will also be published in Issue 46, are:

  • “Reality Television Reminds Me I Am A Cold Bitch” - Caroline Chavatel

  • “Ode Ending in a Phone Call” - Steven Espada Dawson

  • “Things My Mother Forgot” - Alejandro Lucero

  • “Midnight Animal” - Rachelle Toarmino

  • “Exodus” - Cindy Zhang

Rebecca Hawkes is a queer pākehā poet and painter living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her debut chapbook ‘Softcore coldsores’ was published in AUP New Poets 5 in 2019. She is co-editor of the literary journal Sweet Mammalian and an upcoming anthology of climate change poetry, and is a founding member of popstar poets' performance posse Show Ponies. More of Rebecca’s writing and paintings can be found in journals like Starling, Scum and Stasis, or online at her vanity mirror rebeccahawkesart.com.

Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture, won the 2012 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. He’s been the awarded the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, as well as grants and fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The Corporation of Yaddo, the Loft Literary Center, the Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, and the McKnight Foundation. Rasmussen is also a co-founder of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC. He teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College and lives in Robbinsdale, Minnesota.