Contributor Jordan E. Franklin wins the 2020 Gatewood Prize

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Judge Prageeta Sharma’s remarks on when the signals come homeby Jordan Franklin: 

The first thing that greeted me was the song of the rain/against the hospital windows

The first thing that greeted me when I read this stunning collection was the power of polyphonic verse here, so many voices and ranges: poems about family narrated with indelible soundtracks, deep building emotion, and with added bonus tracks structuring the poignant and perceptual throughout. I simply adore how music and place are deeply entwined, and the dedications and references create such a fierce expanse of scope and pitch making these poems a veritable collection of engaged poetics. When the signals come home is full of potent signals, striking sonorous language, and resolute songs to accompany both addresses, dedications, and storytelling of longing, hope, and grief. We are immersed in popular music references from Prince to The Talking Heads in order to amplify the sonic detail and history of times in these poems. The deep ferocity in these poems is rich, particularly  in how the speaker manages to address racial inequity, the strife of sickness and death, and the necessity of naming the racialized self in place, possession, poetry and in song.

JORDAN E. FRANKLIN is a Black poet from Brooklyn. An alumna of Brooklyn College, she earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton where she served as a Turner Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize offered by the North American Review, and a finalist of both the 2018 Nightjar Review Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Sarah Lawrence Summer Seminar for Writers, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Home School, and Brooklyn Poets. Her first chapbook “boys in the electric age” is forthcoming from Tolsun Books in Summer 2021.

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