2025 SHP Chapbook Contest Results

The editors of Slapering Hol Press are proud to announce Gabriel Furshong's AROUND THE COUNTRY A CHASM as the winner of the 2025 Chapbook Contest. Here is a complete list of honorees from this year's contest, with a poem from each manuscript.

Winner

AROUND THE COUNTRY A CHASM

Gabriel Furshong

Gabriel Furshong is a father, writer, and teacher from Helena, Montana. A correspondent for Montana Quarterly, he also reports on politics for The Nation, High Country News, and other magazines. His poetry and nonfiction can be found at Westerly, Tahoma Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. His poetry collection Around the Country a Chasm was a finalist for the 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition.

Reburial

A ring around a bone

matched a hand in the village

a scrap of rotten cloth

to a bright bolt in the cupboard

The way little skeletons lay

kindled inseverable lives

described by parents

confirmed by neighbors

These remains

unearthed and recollected

measured and scraped

labeled and shelved

Church doors gape

circles of men uncoil

five pine crates nailed at the alter

hauled to the bed of a truck

Five pallbearers hand them up

like possessions boxed between houses

diggers take them down

lighter than bundles of sticks

Kneeling at the grave

mothers old enough to be grandmothers

their voices quaver and wail

their voices mend the sequence

Gabriel Furshong, AROUND THE COUNTRY A CHASM—“Reburial,” originally published in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, eds. Melissa Kwasny and M. L. Smoker, Lost Horse Press, 2009.

___

Runner-up 

EPHEMERA

Chris Lisieski

Chris Lisieski is an attorney and poet. He graduated from Antioch College with a degree in philosophy and creative writing, and the University of Virginia with a J.D.  His work has been published by In Parentheses, The Courtship of Winds, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, and The Good Life Review.  He has one good dog, one other dog, and a multitude of rotating hobbies.

ephemera 31.

hunter is deadly

quiet when he comes

home after seven

twelves on the rig

eyes in the defilade

between brow and cheek

nothing’s bad

enough to hold sway

like what he saw

in the desert a girl

holding half of her

twin like a red rag

doll like half

of her heart missing

so when he drinks

he does it with purpose

and his doodles

on the napkin

spiral looser

as the fallen soldiers

mount next to him

until becca brings them

to the recycling

quietly

Chris Lisieski, EPHEMERA—“Ephemera 31,” originally published in The Good Life Review, Issue #19, Spring 2025.

____

Finalist

MORE EARTH THAN FLAME

Tim Raphael

Tim Raphael lives in Northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande Gorge and Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his wife, Kate. They try to lure our three grown children home for hikes and farm chores as often as possible. Tim works as a media consultant to environmental nonprofits and writes early in the morning and late at night after walks on the mesas surrounding his community. His poem, Prayer of a Nonbeliever, won Terrain.org's 2024 poetry contest, judged by Ross Gay, and it was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Tim is  a graduate of Carleton College.

Prayer of a Nonbeliever

Cathartes aura – purifying breeze –

is one name for a turkey vulture,

and what if prayer is like that –

praise song for a scavenger?

What if prayer is like this walk,

the same one every day,

a mantra of footsteps on mesa rock,

raptors in the wind?

What if it begins as a hint

on the piñon stippled hills,

unfurls like a scent the dogs sense

with raised snouts?

I suspect there’s prayer in the primrose

come into flower,

flake-white blossoms

blanketing the path,

in the rhythm of my quickened pulse

on the climb.

And if prayer takes its time on ridgelines,

in scant shade,

if it lingers by a petroglyph picked

into basalt – two figures with hands on hips

as if ready to dance –

then perhaps I am learning to pray.

Today, another friend’s diagnosis,

and who am I to scoff at believers?

I too like the idea of prayer as a stand-in

for clumsy words like hope,

wonder and love – for this green

green valley slaked on spring runoff,

for the whorl of dihedral wings

and the uneven heat of rising air.

Tim Raphael, MORE EARTH THAN FLAMES—“Prayer of a Nonbeliever,” the winning poem in Terrain.org 14^th annual poetry contest, 2024.

_____

Finalist

WASP CHAPEL

Zachary Bos

Zachary Bos is a poet, essayist, and editor based in Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Fulcrum, Morning Star, Berfrois, Bosphorus Review of Books, Iowa Review online, and Literary Imagination, among other venues. A finalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize and the Disquiet Literary Prize, he directs Pen & Anvil Press and is co-owner of Bonfire Bookshop. He is an alumnus of the MFA poetry workshops at Boston University and a union organizer by day. Most recently, he was named as an International Merit awardee in the 2025 Atlanta Review poetry competition and semifinalist in the 2025 Midway Journal flash fiction competition. He has authored numerous chapbooks and designed scores of book covers for independent and commercial literary presses.

Plum Island

Which are you going to do, small plovers?

Run for cover, or take the plunge? Neither;

you just hover at the shoreline, where waves

smooth and resmooth the sand, til it’s as raw

as scraped calfskin. Little poem makers...

What are you writing, plovers? With your feet

stamping cuneiform into the beach:

malisons against seals, paeans to great

birds of bygone years. These are our stories,

you peep. May they never be forgotten.

Until the next tide. Where are your lovers,

plovers? Where are your children, your parents?

Do you write to them, of them, for them? Your

white pages are punctuated by spoor.

Zachary Bos, WASP CHAPEL, “Plum Island,” first published in the Iowa Review

_____

Finalist

CARE INSTRUCTIONS

James King

James King holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and serves as Poetry Editor for Bear Review. A two-time Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in Moon City Review, ONE ART, Passages North, The Shore and others. He lives in New Hampshire, where he is working on his first full-length manuscript. Find him online at jamesedwardking.net or on Instagram @jamn_king.

Boyhood

My first punch—weak-boned, hateful little beast.

Its ancestors—those fistfights erupting from the snow

between the older boys in the after-school program,

T-shirts and shorts in twenty-four degrees, 

red faces, ruddy knuckles. My first punch

born to a warmer climate—fifth-grade 

spring, my best buddy Jeff with a new iPod

Touch I watched him play while we rode 

to school, sticky brown leather on Bus 109. 

Jack and Hunter, Back Road boys in the seat behind—

my first punch’s mother and father. Jack I think

who cupped our ears and cracked my head

against Jeff’s. Temple to temple.

My first punch crowned, squalling. I threw it

backwards because I did not want to look at it—

tossed a fist over my shoulder like dark clods of earth,

like I was digging, a trowel in my hand. 

It must have looked so funny. I heard Hunter giggling.

I don’t know if I hit him. I don’t know who I hit.

I know this was the first tenderness a boy gave me—

Jeff’s skull and mine, ringing like a wedding bell.

Jack’s hands in the after, holding us in our pain.

James King, CARE INSTRUCTIONS—“Boyhood,” first published in Thimble

___

Finalist

MIDRASH OF THE JERSEY DEVIL

Lisa Rosinsky

Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the North American Review James Hearst Poetry Prize, Orison Book Prize, Ó Bhéal International Poetry Competition, Fugue Poetry Contest, and Morton Marr Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her poems have appeared recently in North American Review, Vita Poetica, SWWIM, Palette Poetry, Third Coast, and other journals and anthologies. In 2016, she won the Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Boston Public Library, where she completed her debut novel, Inevitable and Only.

Bach Prelude in C

You know, I’m one of the last generations that will die, he says,

lying on the couch after surgery. The skiing accident, the fractured

backbone. His voice doesn’t crack. Death makes no evolutionary

sense these days, we’re almost past it. I really do believe that. Braids

his fingers. When I was four, I sat on his knees at the keyboard

and slid my hands over those freckled knuckles as he traced

one chord at a time. I called it “Snowflakes.” The geometric shape

of each bar spelled symmetry, crystalline patterns I could learn

like prayer. No part of my mind believes he’s mortal. It goes left

to right, each arpeggiated measure, bass to treble, one hand to the other.

Still, now, I can feel the keys beneath his hands beneath my hands.

Lisa Rosinsky, MIDRASH OF THE JERSEY DEVIL—“Bach Prelude in C,” originally published in Sequestrum.