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The Scarecrow Alibis, poems by Denver Butson, is the winner of Cloudbank’s 2022 Vern Rutsala Book Prize. Zoë Ryder White writes: “The Scarecrow Alibis reads like a love letter to the blundering, persistently tender self.” “Praise by Ilya Kaminsky includes “What a terrific imagination! What verve! . . . . I love this work,.”  

The author has four previous poetry collections and two books with visual artists. Featured on National Public Radio, in the Library of Congress’s Poetry 180 curated by Billy Collins, and in dozens of journals and anthologies, Butson lives in Brooklyn with is wife and daughter. He frequently collaborates with musicians and visual and performing artists

Book of Years by Doug Ramspeck is the runner up for the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize 2021. 80 pages. Ramspeck is the author of eight poetry collections, one collection of short stories, and a novella. A retired professor of English from The Ohio State University at Lima, he lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

The poems in Doug Ramspeck’s Book of Years explore, as one carefully crafted lineation effect puts it, “the life of the unmade,” and discover “the way a cut flower adorns the temporary” and “clouds/going by like the uncut hair of the dead.” The dead, and the past they inhabit, inform the present in this collection in which everything can become “beautiful with forgetfulness.” And the living are here too, often in the form of a wife listening, with the speaker, to “the moon/interrogating the land” and to how rain can be “an illusion of speech//against the eaves.” These poems are elaborate and evocative constructs that offer insight and, more significantly, consolation, which is something we need, it might be said, now more than ever.
     —George Looney, author of The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020

Long Voyage Gathering Light by John Kooistra is the winner of the 2021 Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize. 

Every line in John Kooistra’s poetry in Long Voyage Gathering Light is one more step deeper—not just into the landscape of the world but also of the mind. Sure-footed but open to surprise, linked not just to place but the connections between places, these poems do not hesitate to crunch down to inspect a small track in the snow, or to stand up straight to take hold of an epiphany as sudden and miraculous as Elizabeth Bishop’s moose. Though “. . .cars / shrink to nothing / in the long gaps / between yard lights,” John Kooistra never sleeps in his voyages between Alaska and Ohio, the past and the present, the deep breathing of ideas and the persuasion of wilderness. Kooistra in his poems always finds those crucial moments when the mind needs to pay attention, “the last of the sunset / flaming like a stained glass window.” But he also knows when to shut up and let the world talk: “The sense in all this / I now make a mystery / by asking.”  A salmon fisher for many years on Cook Inlet, Kooistra also knew how to the repair the engine on his boat to keep himself alive. It’s that same ability to take apart and put together small parts into something big and powerful that makes his poems strong for their long voyage. Expertise and patience. Grease and metaphor. 

—Dan Bourne

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My Bright Last Country by Jane Craven is the winner of the 2020 Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize.

The poems are evocative explorations of a woman moving through the world, simultaneously burdened and enriched by her familial past and her own experience. In “The Sketchbooks of Hiroshige” a dead father is remembered as a working man, then touchingly comes to life as a vulnerable child in a Japanese scroll. Craven laments the disappearing natural world in “88 Roads” which describes the aftermath of a flood in a rural county with “its empty highway/ slick with river fish” and its “Huffys tangled in telephone wires, 6,000 hogs/ whose waterlogged bodies knocked against sheet metal/ for days.” These are moving poems of regard in which Craven looks closely, attentively, to reveal the astonishing connective tissues that bind us to others and to the natural world.   

Jane Craven grew up in North Carolina and holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Beloit Journal, The Columbia Review, Tar River Poetry, The Southern Humanities Review and other journals. Her poem, “The Sketchbooks of Hiroshige,” won first prize in The MacGuffin’s 2019 Poet Hunt Contest, guest judged by Richard Tillinghast.

Tarzan's Jungle Plane, prose poetry by Cloudbank editor Michael Malan, is now available. Michael's writing has appeared in numerous journals over the years and this, his second full-length collection, was published by Blue Light Press.  Along with the title poem, this collection includes stories about "Chippewa Street," "Twins," "A Dangerous Woman," and "Richie Rich at Glacier Point."

Praise for this book include these comments by Richard Jones, author of Stranger on Earth: I love how real, how tangible the imaginary worlds of Michael Malan’s prose poems are—their immediacy and intimacy—as well as their accurate portrayal of the human desire to balance history, psychology, and imagination like so many plates spinning atop poles. These exhilarating paragraphs are a delight. As soon as one suspects the tug of easy irony, veils are swept away to astonish as the poet reveals vistas, insights, and what feels to me like truth. 

Deep Territory is a book of poems by Cloudbank Editor Michael Malan. Praise for this book includes this comment by Robert Morgan, author of Dark Energy: “There is a special sense of kinship and community inMichael Malan’s poems: trees, streams, clouds, horses, and horizons. All things are alert, articulate, and time in touch with the timeless.”