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In his Introduction to The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes of the poetic image: One
must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears: If there is a philosophy of
poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse… in the very ecstasy of the
newness of the image.”
Poetry disorders our habitual movement through the world. What our patterns of perception
would render rote, poetry retrieves. It gives us the world anew. This is not newness for the sake
of novelty. This very ecstasy of newness in the fresh poetic image, the ecstatic joy—and ecstatic
pain and awe and annihilation of self—that comes when we counter the world face-to-face
simultaneously again and for the first time.
The poetry that follows comes from the Finalist manuscripts for Interim’s 2022 Test Site Poetry
Prize. Included are selection from the winning manuscripts, Bruce Bond’s The Dove of the
Morning New (winner of the Test Site Poetry Prize) and Hannah Dierdorff’s Rain, Wind,
Thunder, Fire, Daughter (winner of the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize). These come from a
pool of manuscripts of the best writing today, poetry that stuns.
These manuscripts are spectacular, giving the spectacle of life and the language we use to render
our experience of that life. Here is new poetry in the fullest—the ecstatic—sense of the word
new.
Andrew S. Nicholson, Associate Editor