The Tenth Gate Prize, given to a mid-career poet writing in English, has been awarded to Jennifer Richter of Oregon for her poetry collection Dear Future.
The book was chosen from the summer 2022 submissions by judge Felicia Zamora, who says:
In Dear Future, we see the everyday quaked open to expose the seams of life’s uncertainty. Each poem becomes its own magnitude of scale—its own pulsating seismologic wave of language—that breaks loose for us to experience. These poems slide on a tightrope of moments compounded by imagery, ideation, and a slickness of language to portal us through space and time. With breath weaving ultimate control over many of these deliciously unpunctuated poems, we feel a building toward the interrogation of language, motherhood, and the covenants of “natural disaster or lasting love.”
