Winners of the Third Annual First Things Poetry Prize

We are pleased to announce the winners of the third annual First Things Poetry Prize. Forester McClatchey has won first place for his poem “Lethe.” This year’s external judge, James Matthew Wilson, wrote that the sonnet “about memory, desire, and loss achieves something rare: Not just the meter, but the sentence rhythm gives us the voice and music of a searching ache.” Wilson continued:

Anyone can speak in a more or less breathless manner, but only a master of the art can convey to us the ache of being left breathless with a music that allows us not only to hear of but to participate in the emotion.

McClatchey is from Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of Killing Orpheus (Carnegie Mellon, 2026), and his work has appeared in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Image, and Harvard Review, among other journals.

Daniel Luttrull has won second place for “On Suddenly Having Several Children.” Wilson noted: 

The best poems find a way to represent and enter into the everyday and quotidian and to give what may seem the passing details of the day permanent form. Here we have at once that most time-bound and yet universal of human experiences, a visit to the midwife or doctor for a sonogram, and we find both the particular details of the world and of the movements of the mind expressed along with a surprising but wholly adequate final symbol to capture the beauty, expectations, and anxiety of motherhood and fatherhood.

Luttrull is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. His essays and poems have appeared in The Lamp, Front Porch Republic, First Things, America Magazine, and Nimrod International Journal. 

Both poems will be published in the October issue of First Things and will receive cash awards of $2,000 and $1,000 respectively.

The First Things Poetry Prize is an annual award for a formally accomplished poem of up to forty lines. The magazine has a longstanding commitment to poetry and has published some of the leading poets of the last thirty years. We are pleased to continue this commitment to the art of poetry with an annual prize thanks to the generous support of the Tim & Judy Rudderow Foundation.