We are very pleased to announce that the smart, musical, surprising Otherly, by Rebecca Reynolds, has been selected as the winning manuscript for this year’s 42 Miles Press Poetry Award!
Please join us in congratulating Rebecca on this achievement. Rebecca’s book will appear on October 1, 2025, with a public reading in the fall on the campus of Indiana University South Bend.
Read a sample poem from Otherly below as well as review the full list of finalists for this year’s award.
Rebecca Reynolds has published two books of poetry, Daughter of the Hangnail, and The Bovine Two-Step, with New Issues Press. Her first book, Daughter of the Hangnail, received the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has been a recipient of a Hopwood Award in poetry and a grant from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals. She lives on the western edge of New Jersey with her wife and cats and teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers, New Brunswick. She grew up in Washington, D.C.
LIST OF THINGS I NEED TO LIVE (1)
A negligent mind, the capacity to feel
aloft. A vestigial wing spying on a wing. And my wife,
perfectly different than me,
her coins lie around. Her yellowing pillow clumps
around the globe of her breath.
I want to lob that pillow out the window one night
let it plummet to the roses as she sleeps, until her sheets
have smoothed, and pennies
fall back in her wallet, and my very own clothes
fold themselves, Kondo style, and sit
in their slots. And then, I will need remorse.
She replicates the moon. I go round
and round until her whiteness resolves into olive skin
and scrubs. I need to worship her surface
of Lebanese-Italian bones. By day I need to see the white moths
flirting above the window box until I name them
after my grandparents, who would love one another
and die. If I see them loop and diverge and flutter as a pair
they are mine. I need them to be Leon and Pauline.
I need to wash my hands again and again and look
on moths, freed from their chrysalis of eternal Jewish sleep. I need
to change thoughts, defund the police, abolish prisons. I need to know
how to change and how to move with those intellects of moths I have willed
into souls so many times with the accomplishments
of knowledge, for I need to be the couple, the scientist
and social worker entwined, speakers of Yiddish,
writers of Hebrew and letters, easy
correspondents of words. She would tell me
to focus on what I can change. I need
to stay home again and again to save myself. To stare
at the fuchsia centers of coleus that blaze outside the window
in a box of dirt surrounded by veins. I need to see
living things. To glance again
at moths latticing sunlight, the color of paper
lucent above spent lilac
and the pallium of green
when late flowers dry. I need their slow unbecoming,
their drift into moldy wedding gowns, spider webs,
and carcasses of petals effacing white when
October loves us.
appeared in The Gamut Mag, March 2022
42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023) Finalist List (with thanks to all our contestants and all our editors). This list is longer than it has ever been. There were simply more great mss. this year.
Rebecca Reynolds – Otherly (Winner)
Angela Sorby – Reading Trouble (First runner up)
Talia Bloch – How We Keep Each Other Company (Second runner up)
Corrie Williamson – Your Mother’s Bear Gun (Third runner up)
Eric Roy – American Distance
Tom McCauley – First Date with the Moon
John Tobin – All My Gods are Dead
Michael Tod Edgerton – Shelter Shutter Swerve
Elizabeth Hutton – I Didn’t Know How Plastic
Hannah Loeb – Cul de Sac
Susan Coronel – The Only Real Mother
Greg Lawless – Discovery
Eric Steineger – Cast
Ann Lovett – The Community of Rain
Gary McDowell- Marriage And
Rebecca Myers – Warble
Jeanne Marie Beaumont – Lessons with Scissors
Daniel Beigelson – ritual jukebox
Jack Christian – In Plain Air
Grant Clauser – Temporary Shelters
Adam LeFevre – The World is Full of Gods
Evan Nicholls – Easy Tiger
Mark Neely – Late Stage
Rebecca Lilly – Night Westerly
Peter Grandbois — Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person
Sara Wallace – Take That Unmarked Exit
Leona Sevick – The Bamboo Wife
Zoodikers: A Bestiary – Flower Conroy
Bruce Bond – Fables
David James — Singing Like I Have All the Time
Danielle Hanson – The Night is What It Eats
Laura Minor – Carpet Shark
Bern Mulvey – Found
Cynie Cory – Sonnet Being Buried
Eva Heisler – The Sea and The Residency Permit
Jean Gallagher – River of This
Phillip Sterling – Equilibria
Lorene Delany -Ullman – The Grief Contest
Jeanne Morel – Scattering Particles
Natalie Solmer – Water Castle
Mary Ann Samyn – Eden in Every Direction
Craig Cotter – That Night
42milespress.com 