Our 2025 Spring Short Prose Poetry Competition was adjudicated by Ingrid Jendrzejewski whose Judge’s Report appears below. The winning poems appear in Issue 34: Four.
The 2025 results are:
First Place
- Sympathy Cards by Lucia Owen
Second Place
- Tender Blue by Annastatia Brooks
Third Place
- A Small City with Trams by Michael Mintrom
Honourable Mention
- Mountain Flower Homily by Maggie Russell
Commended
- ‘Aeolus, Tinos’ by David Capps
- ‘Daughter’ by Lulu Sinnott
- ‘I like to drink overnight coffee’ by Anastasia Xiao
- ‘poetry is’ by Blanche Saffron Kabengele
- ‘the weight of it all’ by Alexina Dalgetty
Judge’s Report
This has been a tough year for me personally, which brought into sharp focus how vitally important a connection to words and art can be. I always love spending time with new writing, but this time, the time I was able to spend with these poems was a little oasis of beauty. I am thrilled that The Prose Poem will be able to share the winners and most of the shortlisted poems in the weeks and months to come.
As with any juried project, I think it’s important to acknowlege the subjectivity involved in the process; I am one person in a particular moment of time. It was hard enough to whittle the longlist down to a shortlist, and next to impossible to select only a handful of prize-winners, and then rank them. I said it last year and I’ll say it again: on a different day or with a different judge, the results may have been very different. However, this shouldn’t take away any of the glory from the four poems selected as prize-winners; they all have been rattling around in my mind for weeks, and I’m sure they will stay with me for a long, long time.
Since I got away with it last year, here is my final list with a slightly cheating ‘Commended’ category. I’ll now take a few moments to celebrate what I loved most about each poem….
First Place: Sympathy Cards
The Prose Poem has a word count of 500 words for most submission calls. Many poets make use of this, with most submissions coming in over over 300 words. In order to explore a larger variety of lengths, the Spring Short series was launched in the hopes that it would encourage authors to lean in to brevity, compression, contraction, and attract writers who were already writing shorter work.
Interestingly, most of the poems we receive for this call end up being quite close if not spot on the maximum word count of 100 words. ‘Sympathy Cards’, on the other hand, clocks in at 45 words, less than half the maximum allowed. One of the reasons this poem rose to the top of my list is that it embraces the spirit of the Spring Short competition; it does more with less, and says everything it needs to say and nothing more.
It wasn’t just about brevity, however. This poem hit a very personal nerve. I selected the shortlist whilst my sister was in hospital, and I’m writing these final notes after she has passed. Although my personal experience hasn’t yet caught up to the end of the poem, ‘Sympathy Cards’ cut to the quick of the emotional geography I’ve been inhabiting over these past weeks, and it touched me deeply. It’s truth was real and salient, and I appreciate the way its grief is rich and palpable and stark, filling the space between and around the few words it employs.
Second Place: Tender Blue
‘Tender Blue’ makes beautiful use of share specific details to invoke an entire childhood and emotional landscape, bookended by a moment in the now that speaks to something universal about memory, maturation and the passage of time. I love the tension the poem creates between the narrator’s desire to lean into a version of their past constructed from happy memories and their acknowledgment of what is ‘probably best’. But then, as the poem says, ‘even still’. I am right there with the narrator, pressing every now and then….
Third Place: A Small City with Trams
The last line of this poem is a quiet image that has lingered in my head since I first read it. I don’t want to spoil the first read, but I love how the poem starts with a particular statement and then expands outward to encompass family, community, a city, an entire history, and then invites us to think about how all these layers live on, around, alongside, inside of us as we go about our lives. It’s a beautifully constructed piece and offers surprises and insights well past the first reading.
Honourable Mention: Mountain Flower Homily
I love the way this poem starts with an intriguing juxtaposition between the roads and hazard cones and campchairs of the human-made world and the pines, snowfall and yellow flowers of the mountain landscape…and then opens out into yet another realm in the last line when it seems both the narrator and the natural are united in attending to another, perhaps spiritual or transcendent mode. It is a poem that invites us into stillness and contemplation; the stiller we sit with it, the louder it sings.
Commended Poems
I’d also like to take this opportunity to commend ‘Aeolus, Tinos’ for its rich imagery and sense of place, ‘Daughter’ for the way it dances with past, present and future in its its beautifully rendered truth, ‘I like to drink overnight coffee’ for its gorgeous final turn, ‘poetry is’ for its playfulness with words and structure, and ‘the weight of it all’ for its effective use of repetition and form.
*
In this difficult year, I was more grateful than ever for the chance to spend time reading and thinking about each and every poem that was submitted. Thank you to all the poets who gave me the opportunity to spend time with your work. It has been an honour and privileg to read your words.
— Ingrid Jendrzejewski, August 2025