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The Bordighera Poetry Prize

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Joseph Di Prisco: 1st Runner-Up 2009 Bordighera Prize

The first runner-up for 2009 Bordighera Prize was Joseph Di Prisco of Berkeley, California, for his manuscript: No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of This Poem. He has won other poetry prizes, such as the Theodore Roethke Prize of Poetry Northwest, and published two books of poems, Wit’s End (University of Missouri Press) and Poems in Which (Bear Star Press, The Brunsman Poetry Prize). His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including: Fine Madness, Best of Fine Madness, Epoch, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Now, Kayak, Italian Americana, Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, 88, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore, Review, Syracuse Poems, and others. He's published two novels with MacAdma/Cage and will have a third from them next years, and two books related to child development with DaCapo Press, as well as many book reviews, and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He taught for twenty years in middle school, high school, and college, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. See: http://www.diprisco.com/ for more information.

Distinguished Poet Judge for 2009-2010, Patricia Fargnoli, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, wrote of Di Prisoc’s manuscript, No Animals Were Killed in the Making of This Poem: Whatever else Di Prisco’s witty (mostly catalogue) poems may be about, they are first about language— how it rollicks and leaps, how it surprises, how it can hurtle the reader from one wild image to the next without even a pause. And perhaps, next, Di Prisoc’s poems are about imagination itself, how a piano tuner can drop into a poem with his hero sandwich without warning, for instance, or one can find “a moose in the fridge.” The world of these poems is a zany world. The voice in the poems is young, energetic, funny, full of an “impossible joy;” it holds “nothing back.” The reader feels propelled, as if on a Nantucket sleigh ride, through a world that is, at bottom, shifty and chaotic and often dreamlike because (as DiPrisco tells us in “Mission Statement:” ) “What is a man without a dream/ I say he is calamari soup.” We are caught up in this “dream” with him as “he zooms toward what’s left of the sea..