Our Best of the Net Nominees

We’ve been taking a little break, but are gearing up to get back into the flow of things soon. In the meantime, please take a second to congratulate our Best of the Net Anthology nominees. In the past, the anthology has recognized work that originally appeared in Radius, including  Fatimah Asghar’s “For Jonylah Watkins, Who Was Shot 5 Times While Her Father Was Changing Her Diaper,” Tatyana Brown’s “Your Invitation to the Wake: For Alexandra Petri, After Her Article, ‘Is Poetry Dead?’” and Jean Macpherson’s “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary,” and we have high hopes for this year’s nominations:

Poetry:

“There Are So Many Poems For Black Boys in America” by Caits Meissner (Oct. 13, 2014)

“Pretty Woman” by Ricky Garni (Nov. 4, 2014)

“Self Portrait #12” by Wil Gibson (March 6, 2015)

“Blast/oma” by Chace Zachery Morris (March 15, 2015)it was one of us” by Richard H. Fox

“Time Capsule” by Deonte Osayande (June 24, 2015)

Fiction:

“Reissue” by Erika Jahneke (Oct. 11, 2014)

Creative Nonfiction:

“On Distance” by Lauren Gordon (March 30, 2015)

‘I Have A Right to be Angry‘: The Power and Pain of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut
Essay by Victor D. Infante, Poems by Alan King, Christina Springer, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Casey Rocheteau, Sonya Renee Taylor and Danez Smith (Dec. 6, 2014)

As always, Radius has fairly distinct taste, and we try to reflect that in our award nominations. We prefer poems that have a tangible presence in the real world, poems which can act as a life preserver when necessary, which can shift or at least inform the way a reader thinks. We favor political poems, but recognize that there is no way to separate politics from the things we love and fear. We find poetic power in portraits of pain and loss, but also in complicity. We recognize that few if any of us come to the table of either politics or poetry with clean hands. We like our fiction pulpy, in an old-school way. We can be high-brow sometimes, sure, but gives us a good mystery or superhero story and we’re totally fine. We like our nonfiction to explore how this all links together, these poems and this pain, this heroic tradition and the people it regularly fails. We want to know how a poem works. We never feel like we’re done learning.

So congratulations to our nominees, and  thank you for helping make Radius the journal it is today.