“Ghost Stories,” by Michael Collins and Annie Kim, is lovely and—appropriately enough—haunting, with the two voices echoing and playing off each other yet appearing seamless. Simultaneously dark and lyric, musical and surprising, it is everything I would look for in a collaborative sequence.
—Judge Ruth Foley
Ghost Stories by Michael Collins and Annie Kim
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Annie Kim’s first poetry collection, Cyclorama, won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Southern Indiana. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Mudlark, Asian American Literary Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowship, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service.
Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 50 journals and magazines, including Grist, Kenning Journal, Pank, and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook Contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year, and a second chapbook, Harbor Mandala, appeared in 2015. Visit www.notthatmichaelcollins.com for more.
First Runner-up: “The Dose” by Lissa Kiernan & Kim Peter Kovac
Second Runner-up: “Old Man Blue Fairy” by Dustin Michael & Neesha Navare
Honorable Mention: “Every Day a New Death” by Lisette Alonso & Janelle Garcia
Read letter from our guest judge, Ruth Foley
About our Guest Judges
Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two greyhounds, one of whom sometimes gets mistaken for a cow. Her work is easy to find online and in her chapbooks, Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press, 2013) and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications, 2015). She is easy to find at fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com or by looking at her sofa. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.
Patrick Shawn Bagley‘s debut crime novel Bitter Water Blues was published in January 2015 by Snubnose Press. His stories of hardscrabble life and rural mayhem have appeared in Crimespree Magazine, Thrilling Detective, Spinetingler, The Iconoclast, and the anthology Uncage Me. He was one of the founding editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, an annual anthology. Bagley lives and writes on a dead-end dirt road in a one-stoplight town. During the day, he works at a nonprofit community support program for adults with intellectual disabilities.
Need more? Read cahoodaloodaling‘s best of the best: 2015 Nominations
Patrick Shawn Bagley: There are more hitman stories out there than any sane person could ever want to read. For me, the main consideration was figuring what I could do to make my guy stand out in such a huge crowd. Joey grew tired of the life and did his best to get out of it, going back to the mob only when he had no other choice. Another difference is my choice of setting. Most of the novel takes place in rural Maine, not exactly a hotbed of gangland activity. I think that setting shapes the characters and directly affects the plot. Noir doesn’t have to mean “big city.” Life in the country is just as brutal, with men and women who doom themselves day by day.