Lummox Press welcomes poet and educator B.J. Buckley to the Angela Consolo Mankiewicz Poetry Contest. As judge she brings a wealth of experience with her, so you better send her your best!

B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts-in-Schools programs throughout the west for over 40 years. Her prizes and awards include a Wyoming Arts Council Literature Fellowship; The Cumberland Poetry Review’s Robert Penn Warren Narrative Poetry Prize; the New York-based Poets & Writers “Writers Exchange Award” in Poetry; the Rita Dove Poetry Prize from the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, Winston-Salem, NC; and the Joy Harjo Prize from CutThroat: A Journal of Arts and Literature; the Winning Writers award for formal poetry, and the Comstock Review Poetry Prize. She has been awarded residencies at the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Colrain Manuscript Conference.

Her poems have appeared widely in both print and on-line journals including Pilgrimage, Cut Throat: A Journal of the Arts, About Place Journal, MezzoCammin, The Big Sky Journal, Green Mountains Review, Visions International, Sequestrum, december,The Cortland Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Ellipsis, Sky Island Journal, and Epiphany. Her work is included in many anthologies, including Leaning Into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek (Houghton Mifflin); Wyoming Fencelines, a collection of poems about fences and other boundaries by Wyoming authors; and Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry About Birds (Henry Holt). Her books include Artifacts; Moon Horses and the Red Bull, ProngHorn Press, with co-author Dawn Senior-Trask; a letterpress chapbook, Spaces Both Infinite and Eternal, 2013, Limberlost Press; and Corvidae, Lummox Press 2014.

Here’s an example of her craft as a poet:

Eating Seven Pips of a Pomegranate
           in Defiance of Winter

The fruits of February

are tight and sweet and small,

the rich dark red of blood

that’s settled into the limbs

and begun to cool. Two days ago

all rodent auguries were ambivalent,

contradictory under partly cloudy

heavens soft with thaw – men

in top hats far too squeamish

for consulting entrails, for cutting

anything open. Persephone

was wiser than her years

to take that gut-slashed womb

into her hands, suck the sweet juice

sluicing through her fingers,

tease out pips to feed the wolf

in her belly lest it devour her

will. Seven: snowdrift, sleet-knife,

ice-lock, gale, blizzard, ravens,

burial. Seven pips: and so, I,

against the spell of turncoat

January with its melts and drips.

Last night together cold and darkness

fell and fell and fell, the snow ground glass

against all flesh, and wind a beast

whose claws, like ghosts, could reach

through walls, fierce bird who broke

each branch it rested on. So I,

so nourished, loosed my hair,

went out to marry:

sparrows dropped frozen

from the lilac hedge. Old cottonwoods,

their shattered bones. Blood

where an owl fed.

That flame of ice, my heart.

That flame, the moon.

               for Jane Wohl