On behalf of Green Linden Press, I congratulate Boyer Rickel for winning the sixth annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Green Linden Press will publish What Happened to the Inca Doves? in January 2027. Named for an essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater, the Prize awards $1000 and publication for a manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be and demonstrates anew the rich potentials of lyric language.
What Happened to the Inca Doves? reveals a life through a mosaic of literary forms: prose poems, diary entries, epistles, fragments of dreams. Its seven sections work in concert toward a portrait, from childhood memories to the death of a lover to the desires of a man in his eighth decade. What remains consistent throughout is a steady, welcoming voice, trustworthy and brave in its eagerness to understand.
Boyer Rickel's publications include two book-length poetry collections, arreboles (Wesleyan) and remanence (Parlor Press), a memoir-in-essays, Taboo (Wisconsin); Morgan (a Lyric), winner of the Gold Line Press nonfiction chapbook contest, as well as three poetry chapbooks, Tempo Rubato (Green Linden Press), Musick's Hand-maid and reliquary (both from Seven Kitchens Press). A recipient of poetry fellowships from the NEA and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, he taught in the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program for twenty years.
I would like to honorably mention numerous poets whose manuscripts we found exciting and evocative:
Dia Calhoun’s Liber Cantus Arborei
Kevin Carollo’s The Dialogic Immolation
Beau Farris’s The Labyrinth Considers Daedalus
Stephanie Glazier’s Of Fish & Country
Dale Going’s Sonnets of Succor and Sorrow
Sarah Heady’s The Hudson Lines
Wen Jing’s Underworld
J.I. Kleinberg’s All of We
Raymond Luczak’s [title redacted]
Michael Marberry’s LINEAGE
Jodhi Mather-Pike’s When Beauty Carved Your Name
Elizabeth Pérez’s The Sky’s Glass Eye Knocked Out in a Barfight: Collected Poems
E.M. Schorb’s The Journey
et.stark’s Operation Moon Disaster
The Wishing Jewel Prize contest will re-open August 1 through November 30, 2026.
Best wishes and happy reading! Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher
