2024 Louis Award Winner
Judge Emily Ransdell selected as winner of the 2024 Concrete Wolf Louis Award
Not Now But Soon
by Chris Dahl.
Ransdell says: “These are quietly intelligent poems that face the losses of aging with grace. Some are melancholy, some downright sad, but always grounded in an authenticity that feels like wisdom to me. I believe this voice, so at home in her garden, so attuned to the seasons and the coming of fall. The metaphors feel natural, yet surprising, as a good metaphor must be.”
A Pacific Northwest native, Chris Dahl was raised among the brash sighs of fir trees in winter and the soothing lullabies of grasshoppers and crickets in summer. This environment led to a poetic process that she describes as cupping her hand into a murky pond and offering the contents for examination: tadpoles and larvae, moss strands, algae, broken bits of leaves, and other detritus. Maybe even a spider testing its way along the surface tension of the top. She tries to point out liveliness and interconnectedness, the odd patterns to be found in each sampling, and hopes to reveal glimpses of a different world, half-hidden in this one.
Her chapbook, Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts (now out of print), was published after winning Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition. Her poems have been placed in a wide variety of journals such as Bennington Review, The Main Street Rag, About Place Journal, Split Lip, and, most recently, Naugatuck River Review. Her poems have also appeared in the recent anthologies Purr and Yowl (World Enough Writers) and Thin Places and Sacred Spaces (Amethyst Press) among others. She has had poems nominated both for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.
For close to thirty years Chris has been a board member of the Olympia Poetry Network and edited their monthly newsletter which has included a number of her short essays on the art and craft of poetry. Many of the lessons she passes on came through mentors such as David Wagoner, Heather McHugh, and Sharon Bryan at the UW where she received the equivalent of an MFA. She also learned much from Centrum classes led by Lisel Mueller, Marvin Bell, and both Staffords, William and Kim. She is also grateful for those writers who have shared their knowledge and experiences in book form. Tony Hoagland’s Twenty Poems That Could Save America , The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser, and Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows come to mind—but there are many more.
Though she has lived for brief stints in England and Florida, snowbirded in Arizona for twenty years, and set foot on all seven continents, she now lives on a pothole lake within the city limits of Olympia, Washington, with her husband and cat named Sylvie—who, in a previous life, was known as Minnow. She gardens, keeps an eye on the wild ducks and geese, and offers support (mostly moral) to her ninety-plus-year-old mother.
Chris reading from Not Now But Soon
also featuring Jennifer Saunders
Poem from Not Now But Soon
Moment That Would Make Us Immortal
If I told you it was the light pressed green
before the shuttered clouds, you’d think
it was one thing.
But it’s also the white, luminous belly
of the Hungarian Jesus.
And the gold mosaic firmament spreading
from his mother’s halo.
It’s the inaudible click of the trout
as it wheels from your shadow, the thrust
and jibe of a summer storm.
Not what’s perfect but what’s compelling.
Leaves at night compounding darkness.
A gust of distant vowels.
The metallic taste of love
from a bit lip.
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Finalists
George Such
Jen Karetnick
Miriam Weinstein
Laurie Kuntz
Becoming Like the Egret
Domiciliary
Here, Beyond, Between
Shelter in Place
Honorable Mentions
Jay Brecker
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
Jed Myers
Craig Thompson
Barbara Brooks
Mike Wilson
Linda Scheller
Gunilla Kester
Catherine Arra
Stephanie Harper
James Penha
Linda Bamber
Tim Gillespie
Tim Barnes
Bruce Lowry
Paul Buchheit
Carol Alena Aronoff
Stephanie Pressman
Charlotte Porter
Donald Illich
Judith Skillman
Carla Schick
Joshua Coben
Frank William Finney
Lewis Leicher
of Our Lives
blue collar eclogue
The Book She Remembers
Cézanne’s Apples
Difficult Customers
Finding My Way
First Responder
The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street
Hold Me Still
The Hollows
Instar
Jekyll’s Lover
Look Twice
Nocturnal Maturation Symphony
The Palaver of Place
Secrets of the Land
Senescence Sonnets
Solitary Solitude Sanctuary
Speak for Those Rendered Silent
Stickwood
Surrender, Surrender
Two of Every
Words Like Stones
The World Above You
Wormwood Punch
Young and Old
