“What a beautiful book.”
“Starting with the cover. The layout, the poems. All. I am so proud to be in it. I was especially taken by the last poem, haunting and beautiful, full of what we know and don’t know, down to the bone.”
– Ann Robinson
Cover to cover art by Jack Pierson
Order from Itasca or Box Turtle Press
The Winning Poem of the 18th Mudfish Poetry Prize
Judged by Vijay Seshadri
Stacy Spencer
SEND ME AWAY
I go back to the atlas. Its version of the nation,
all highways and place names, lies open
on my lap. Ohio unfolds. We are driving east
on I-80, leaving my native state behind– a place
I have left over and over. The Midwestern sky
spreads high and wide, woven of sunlight
and vaporized water. The weather is cooperating
for once. We pass field after field of corn.
At age ten I got lost in my grandfathers’s cornfield.
The earth in there was a mass of worm-like roots.
Walking was hard. The hot sky was visible
through leaf blades. We are now passing a lake
edged with reeds. I know such lakes by heart:
muck and the mussels that cut. We will be
home in another day. There is salmon in the freezer.
The table is worn but sturdy, waiting for us.
A fish is a structure of fins and spine, gills and scales,
blood and muscle. I think of my parents back in Michigan,
their skin turning to paper. I have left over and over.
I see the hot sky through the sunroof. Masonry is
a compound made of sand, glass, shell, and stone.
Down in the cellar of the house where we now live,
a plumber scraped the antebellum foundation.
“See,” he said, “a clamshell–from the river.”
19th Mudfish Poetry Prize
To be judged by Billy Collins
Entry Fee: $20 for 3 poems
Cash Prize: $1,200
A prize of $1,200 and publication in Mudfish is given annually for a single poem. Winning poem and two honorable mentions will be published in Mudfish 26.
ALL POEMS CONSIDERED FOR PUBLICATION!
Deadline: January 15th, 2026
We are proud to announce that Billy Collins will judge. Submit up to three poems of any length with a $20 entry fee ($3 for each additional poem).
About Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including Whale Day, The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.
The Polish Dream Machine
Mudfish Individual Poet Series #21, by Richard Fein
“I had to go to the hospital to give birth,” the poet states. When the book emerges, it is wild. The Polish Dream Machine is marked by the incredible candor Richard Fein is famous for. These are exquisite poems about old age: “the flabs, and creases, and moles, and little growths.”
He loses a classmates, Irving Levine, who disappeared (“not by moving away but just by not being at all”) and this stuck with him all his life. “And I am now not far from ending up where Irving did…. Irving…/Irving–my street address here in Cambridge.”
Richard Fein is 95. His poems in The Polish Dream Machine bring beauty to the terrors of old age. They are quintessential meditations on identity, love lost, and time gone by–all related with the withering wisdom of old age. They are as candid and revealing as the old French salesman’s screech, from which Fein tells us, “this is how the Jew in me emerged.”
Order from Itasca or Box Turtle Press
Jill Hoffman is a phoenix rising from the ashes with each new book she publishes. And yet, there is a particular poignancy and emotional urgency in her most recent collection, Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves. In her poem “Ghosts” after a painting on the cover of Mudfish 22, the literary journal she has edited and published for decades, Hoffman writes, “We are walking on our own graves / and lying down at night / above our buried / selves / And everybody dies / and nobody dies / because / we are only here for a moment / anyway.” Her poems demonstrate that she is happy, she is funny, she is smart and open to whatever comes her way, and she is willing to fight like a warrior for another day, and the chance to rise from the ashes like a beautiful and majestic bird in her colorful and spectacular Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves.
Dell Lemmon, Single Woman / Are You Somebody I Should Know?
Past Mudfish Judges
Mudfish 9 – Thomas Lux
Mudfish 10 – Charles Simic
Mudfish 11 – Jorie Graham
Mudfish 12 – C. K. Williams
Mudfish 13 – John Ashbery
Mudfish 14 – Charles Simic
Mudfish 15 – David Lehman
Mudfish 16 – Deborah Landau
Mudfish 17 – Mark Doty
Mudfish 18 – Charles Simic
Mudfish 19 – Edward Hirsch
Mudfish 20 – Philip Schultz
Mudfish 21 – John Yau
Mudfish 22 – Erica Jong
Mudfish 23 – Marie Howe
Mudfish 24 – Deborah Landau
Mudfish 25 – Vijay Seshadri
MUDFISH 24 OUT NOW!
An amazing, surprising issue with the winners of the 17th Mudfish Poetry Prize (judged by Deborah Landau), Tim Nolan, Doug Smith, and Francis Klein. Also featuring poetry, fiction, and art by Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Paul Wuensche, Alexander Iskin, Dell Lemmon, Amy Carr, Paul Schaeffer, debut writer Joyce (Chunyu) Wang, and many others.
THE WINNING POEM OF THE 17th MUDFISH POETRY PRIZE JUDGED BY DEBORAH LANDAU
Tim Nolan
MEMOIR
There were days when I was worried—mostly about money
sometimes about love. Days when the sun lit the snow
and I thought I would burst with the joy of the cold. Days
of brilliant blue skies and soft casual rain. Days travelling
across then country during a heat wave racing above
a soft road. Day-in/day-out days when nothing special
happened—when I just barely survived—when I was
full of possibilities. Summer days in New York City—
a kid dancing by a boom box booming. Days of death.
The days when the kids were born. A day devoted
to an old friend. Thanksgiving days and Christmas Days
and Good Fridays when life seemed on a pivot point.
Those perpetual days of summer as a kid—down at the lake
for the whole day. Not-so-special and very special days.
Days made for no good. Days made of only good.
Sacramental days along with those birthdays and death days
that seemed to mark some passage, as if from here on out
it would all be different. A couple of days in Paris.
I wandered around by myself. I stopped when I wanted.
I sat down at a café table. It seemed endless, for the moment,
that the days would go on and would always somehow involve me.
EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED!
“What a funny novel, full of feeling. It spans years of time, but is so immediate. I needed something poetic, and I got it from this novel written by a poet–I loved every single simile. She mentions John Ashbery by his full name more than a few times. He’s a character in the novel, but it doesn’t come across pretentiously. And I love that this is her second novel, her first one written in 1993. This should be how writers write novels, producing once every few decades, but I know it’s a career and all, so let them do what they will. It’s a story about a flighty, divorced mom, and her love affair with a young, dickish, strange Russian artist, and how he fits into her messy NYC life. It’s really great. I bought somewhat irresponsibly myself, on a whim, and I’m so glad I did. This reinforces my rampant spending habits. “
In Jill Hoffman’s irresistible Stoned, the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children. An explosive triangle, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, brilliantly drawn with outsized characters worthy of Dickens, lavish imagery, and impeccable comedic timing. Hoffman has written a book so poignant and pleasurable, like a Crème Brûlée for the eyes, you’ll read it again and again. And yet for all its seeming decadence there is a purity here like a fawn running into the water.
Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Author of: Razor Wire Wilderness