Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books I.I The first eight years of Dai’s life smelled like stone. Like the smoky musk of sunbaked battlements and the salty nip of sea-soaked tunnels. And they smelled like gonalei, the roots of the bone white gona flower that grew in abundance at the base of … Read more
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction For a few seconds I was disoriented, unable to focus in the shadows. “Come over here, please,” Tamara said. I stepped around chunks of fallen plaster and joined her. “Can you see it now?” she said. “Yes, I see. What do you call that big one?” “My … Read more
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction The True-Life Story of Mari Carmen Flores Aizpuru, Partner and Lover to Famed Spanish Abstract Painter Bonifacio Alfonso. In 1964, as Spain was thirty years deep under the rule of Francoism, a poor painter came to sit at the table of a well-heeled couple who owned a popular … Read more
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry Rebecca Loggia has been writing stories since childhood, eventually earning a degree in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her work has been published in the Santa Clara Review, Allegory Ridge, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, and elsewhere. Her essay, “How to Rewrite a Medical … Read more
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry A thread of birds pulledfrom the shorn field becomesa scarf knit by the wind,intertwining the branches, flowingastride the bare necks of trees then expands to a needlepoint shawlthrown wild within the October aircovering the grey and brown shoulders of low hillsagainst the coming cold then explodes, full as … Read more
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry No magic roundabout reverie herethe anti ice cream van haunts the suburbssinging scrap iron, any old iron A tannoy trumpets a thin melodya voice singing with a scrape of scrap metalno magic round about here A Bedford van drives slowly down the streeta hawker sings, walking aheadscrap … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books Doug & Lisa – September 9, 2013: The McCloud Falls In September of 2013, after seven years of dating, Doug and I rented an RV and took a trip we referred to as, “Around Mount Shasta in Seven Days.” The journey was supposed to rebuild … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books 1. Feather She hesitated at the fork. One branch ran inland a little way, then hugged the perimeter of the wheat fields where the harvesters had been and gone, scraping the landscape raw. In a couple of weeks, the diggers and then the fertilising machines … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction I don’t know if she always meant it to sound just like every 17th century Slavic fairytale, but her stories too were sinister, expansive and striding; allegorical and feminine, with any resolution not much more than a dissolve into history. Dense, wild land. A peasant girl … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction A slipped disc, that’s what most people call it. Sounds harmless, like a pulled muscle or a headache. Doctors refer to it as a herniated disc or a prolapsed disc. It still doesn’t sound serious or painful. It’s not like a ‘broken leg’ or a ‘defective … Read more