1455 Teen Poetry Contest Winners & Their Poems

Grand Prize ($5,000 Award): 

“At a Wake, I Confront” by Yvanna Vien Tica

Second Prize:

“Elegy for Our Pseudohistories” by Yejin Suh

Third Prize:

“Letters from Pennsylvania to Washington: for Ellie Chu” by Stella Lei

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order)

“Elegy with Lipstick Smear” by Sabrina Guo
“Fissureman” by Matt Hsu
“golden bowl hunger” by Chloe Lin
“Fuego” by Sophie Mateja
“It Takes a Village” by Emily Truman
“Swallow-Boned” by Amy Wang
“crabs caught in chain-link” by Richard Zhu

Poet Bios

Yvanna Vien Tica is a Filipina writer with a hearing impairment who grew up in Manila and a suburb near Chicago. She is the 2021 Hippocrates Young Poet and has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, The Kenyon Review, The Young Playwrights Festival, Princeton University’s Creative Writing Department, The Poetry Society UK, and Aster Lit. Her poetry is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, DIALOGIST, Hobart, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Faith Review, an Executive Editor for Polyphony Lit, a Poetry Editor for The Global Youth Review, and a Poetry Reader for Muzzle Magazine. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying nature and thanking God for another day. She tweets @yvannavien.

Yejin Suh is a writer whose work appears or is forthcoming in Half Mystic, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Polyphony Lit, among others. A YoungArts Finalist for Short Story and a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been recognized by The New York Times, Penguin Random House, and UK Poetry Society. She runs Wintermute Lit, a publication dedicated to fostering emerging voices in speculative writing and art. She is an incoming freshman at Princeton University.

Stella Lei is a teen writer from Pennsylvania whose work is published or forthcoming in Honey Literary, Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.

Sabrina Guo is from Oyster Bay Cove, New York. She is a rising junior and the president and editor-in-chief of KEN, the award-winning literary and art magazine of Syosset High School on Long Island. she studied poetry at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Kenyon Review’s Young Writers Workshop. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Best Teen Writing, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Counterclock, Hippocrates Prize Anthology, and Polyphony Lit, among others. She is the recipient of the Civic Expression Award and an eight-time National Medalist from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, the Poetry Society of Virginia’s Jenkins Prize, and received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is the founder of Girl Pride International and Long Island Laboring Against COVID-19. The Disney Channel profiled her poetry, music, and humanitarian journey in its 2021 “Use Your Voice” social initiative.

Matt Hsu is a junior at San Francisco University High School in San Francisco, California. He works as a poetry/prose editor at Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine and The Formula. Currently he’s working on a YA novel about a lonely assassin. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis and eating dark chocolate.

Chloe Lin hated poetry as a kid; she absolutely despised the thought of rhyming words, as it was clearly too simple for her 11 year old brain. Now a sophomore at Herricks High School, Chloe has come to discover that poetry is not as easy as it seems. Her work has been published in the Rattle Young Poets Anthology, as well as the Young Writers Imagine Anthology; she is also published in her school’s literary journal, OPUS. When Chloe is not selling her soul to a Google document, she’s an avid listener of chinese pop, enjoys messing up recipes in the kitchen, and folding paper cranes.

Sophie Mateja is a sophomore at Pacific Collegiate School. She is the Editor-in- Chief of the school literary magazine, The Finch. Her work has been praised by critics for its “evocative language and deep insight,” taking first prize at numerous local competitions in the past two years. Recently, Mateja was declared a finalist in the Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s ekphrastic poetry contest and published in Inlandia’s spring issue. Mateja’s work has been published frequently in the Half Moon Bay Review and other anthologies including AIPF’s di-vêrsé-city. This year, she is competing in Poetry Out Loud and a variety of national essay and poetry contests. In addition to writing, Mateja enjoys playing orchestral classical music as the principal violist of the Santa Cruz County Youth Symphony and working as a staffer on political campaigns.

Emily Truman is the 17-year-old founder of the Stay Gold Society, an organization dedicated to connecting youth and seniors. In 2019, she started the Holiday HappyMail program, and collected over 10,000 handmade holiday cards for seniors in nursing homes. Prior to the pandemic, she volunteered at a nursing home for over a year, spending hours each week visiting residents and running activities. She has a passion for writing and public speaking.

Amy Wang is a junior from California. In her free time, you can find her crying over fanfiction or translating Chinese webnovels. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and Columbia College Chicago, among others. She currently serves as a fiction editor for the Farside Review and reads poetry for Augment.

Richard Zhu is a rising senior at the Peddie School in Hightstown, NJ. His work has been recognized nationally in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and is published or forthcoming in Polyphony Lit, Eunoia Review, and Bitter Fruit Review. He has also been recognized by Temple University and Mercer University. He is an editor-in-chief of the school literary and art magazine Amphion. Richard loves hot oil noodles and Iceland’s stunning waterfalls.

As a reminder, the theme for this year’s contest was Finding Community During Crisis, and the guidelines requested the poems to reflect on or react to the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural environment (including but not limited to #BLM, #MeToo, COVID, etc.); every poem that made the final cut successfully explored the guidelines, but the diverse and provocative variations on these themes were extraordinary. Just like last year, some of the poems seemed pieced together by newspaper headlines; others invoked family histories (the kinds found in photo albums and especially the kinds kept secret or spoken about for the first time), and there were ingenious, if inevitable references to science, politics, ethnicity, anger, and shame. This being a heavy subject, the weight of these collective words was not inconsiderable, but like the best art, these poems inspire dialogue, they seek understanding, they inspire solidarity. In a time where we’re seeing a general lack of courage and common sense (by our elected leaders, by our neighbors), these poems are at once an indictment and an aspiration to our better angels.

This past year has been a period of intense turmoil and disruption; it’s also been a time of grace, generosity, beauty, and witness borne. As always, we hear our politicians and self-appointed spokespersons eager to opine (but seldom enlighten or console), and as ever, it’s our poets, whom Percy Bysshe Shelley famously declared “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” who best explain and interrogate our lives.

1455’s mission is to celebrate creativity and build community. We do this by encouraging storytellers, and poets are anything but unacknowledged in our corner of the world. Indeed, all of our free programming is offered with the goal of connecting worthy writers and diverse audiences. If we’re able to showcase under-represented artists, all the better. And being able to support young writers is a critical and inextricable part of this process. We are proud and honored to shine a light on voices we can learn from, and as is so often the case, we stand to learn more from our young minds than they do from us.

Some thoughts on our three prize winners

“At a Wake, I Confront” took me several reads to fully and properly absorb and, like any exceptional poem, the more I look at it, the more I see (about the world; about the world of poetry; about myself, etc.). While this poem will resonate in years to come, it will remain a definitive and devastating observation of our world, circa 2021. In succinct fashion, we see and hear about nightmares, scars, breathing, grief, politics—all words and ideas that assume an extra edge, a peculiar urgency, during a time when masks were obliged and intolerance, in some circles, encouraged. On a line-by-line—and word by word—basis, it’s exquisite yet tough, like, say, a diamond dipped in blood. Above all, it evinces the key ingredient suffusing the very best poems: empathy.

“ELEGY FOR OUR PSEUDOHISTORIES” manages to be exhaustive in scope, and emotionally exhausting in ways both right and perhaps required for a year that exacted such a toll; aside from an intolerable body count (abetted, in part, by willful ignorance and malevolence on the parts of both the powerful and the powerless), we’ve all been forced to endure more than a reasonable burden—of suffering, of sudden silence, of uncertainty. Yejin Suh is an old soul, and her poetic sensibility arrives fully-formed in this miniature epic. I’m not certain how such wisdom and talent is acquired at so young an age, but I’m grateful to have it in our world, and I look forward to much more in the future.

“Letters from Pennsylvania to Washington: for Ellie Chu” is another work that manages to address contemporary concerns while achieving a liminal space that is at once urgent and out of time. On a literal level, this is a poem about travel (and trains, gravity, acceleration, motion, and the implication of all of these energies being grounded or derailed—by both clear and less obvious forces). There is a resigned nod to inevitability and even reality which, sadly, in 2021 none of us can assume is reciprocated in good faith, but there’s also an unmistakable vibration of expectation. In the final lines we have something so many of us desperately need and have been in lamentably short supply of lately: hope.

 

Remarks from co-judge Maia Siegel

A great poem clicks onto you, stays attached to your shirt, travels along. The “click” of a poem can feel unjudgeable, and yet, each year, Sean and I put our heads together and try. Poetry, as both a form and a community, is essential after a year filled with so many national traumas. Processing this past year, as we can see from the winning pieces, demands the containment and steady observation of a poem.

In my favorite poems of the many we received, an author would zero in on how politics morphs the body. “Elegy for Our Psuedohistories” clicked onto me with lines like “I saw a fake crime scene on TV once:/just four limbs and a head stretched over a/ dinosaur fossil (extinct body).” I have a weakness for historical poetic sequences, and this one starts unexpectedly–with a kiss, and a smart line break that shows this desire is not for a person but for a machine.

“At a Wake I Confront” clicked onto me with the line-break in “I tell him I fear breathing/without a mask.” This poem starts with a bang, right from the title. The line breaks here are considered, such as in “I tell him I lied/about the old man. I did see him.” The confessional quality makes you read it with a whisper, which is a sign of a poet with power.

“Letter for Ellie Chu” clicked onto me with the image of a girl directing metal forward, trusting flesh over light, which is certainly a powerful beginning of a love poem. I was struck by the transformation from crawling out to coming out, and how they’re positioned next to each other on the same line.

I am so glad I get to carry these poems with me now. I hope you take some time to read them, and maybe even let one attach itself to you. A poem-companion is a wonderful thing.

 

The Winning Poems

Our three finalist’s poems appear below; the other finalists and a selection of notable poems from this contest will be published in a special Teen Poetry edition of 1455’s bi-monthly magazine, Movable Type.

 

At a Wake, I Confront

by Yvanna Vien Tica, Grand Prize Winner of 1455’s Teen Poet Contest

a boy who stares at me. The window parallels
         our distance. Unthreatened, I ask him if he has trouble
sleeping and what pills he takes to bed. Whether 

          his dreams bleed
into night terrors.
          I tell him about my nightmares

mimicking the shudder of an old man’s
          body after a beating. My K-complexes refuse to let me
believe this is all imaginary, 

          that a nation rejecting its blood is innocent
of its sickness. I almost tell him I’ve hunted
          the mountains for respite. The roads etched 

into their sides like scars.
          Instead I tell the boy I avoid
going outside. I tell him 

          about an old Vietnamese-American man
whose store I’d pass on the way to school.
          I haven’t seen him, I say. All the blinds are drawn. 

I tell him I fear breathing
          without a mask. The stench of blood
overwhelms me. I tell him isn’t it 

          interesting how faces are cartography
that can haunt mountains
          like wandering men. I tell him I lied 

          about the old man. I did see him
by the side of his store lying
          unconscious. His head looked like the tomatoes

my mother liked to buy
         from his store to stew in her sour soups.
As if tomatoes could enact 

         violent stages of grief. I tell him that,
lying there, the old man
          reminded me of my grandfather 

taking a nap, his head bowed in a listing prayer.
          I almost apologize for politicizing every story
to keep this nation awake. Instead 

          I tell him how the old man once said he missed wandering
the mountains with good knees. He knew flowers
          like a language and once gave me a hand-picked chrysanthemum

for a long and beautiful life. He told me
         he had a grandson my age and hoped
we’d be friends when he visited. 

          As our reflections touch in the window, I tell the boy
the old man missed his grandson
          more than the mountains and good knees. 

That he would have given him more
          chrysanthemums than he could hold
in his hands, in his vases.

 

Elegy for Our Pseudohistories

All political and social ideologies came alive, in the temporal and spatial sense, in an area completely isolated from the outside world…

—Choi Jungwoon. “The Gwangju Uprising: The Pivotal Democratic Movement That Changed the History of Modern Korea”

That snaggle-toothed boy kissing the rounded corner
of a truck—knees limp against silver hubcaps, a prayer 

hooking him down the roads. Blooming in purpose
and fervor, I believe it. I didn’t believe

the first nursery home fight, nor the second, the third,
but I believe my grandfather on the crimson dusting

his shoes, flowering on the ground, the snaggle-tooth boy
a question of a body. I saw a fake crime scene on TV once:

just four limbs and a head stretched over a
dinosaur fossil (extinct body). A human body inverted

is, after all, only bones reverted, and who’s to say
what belongs on the outside and what doesn’t belong

anywhere at all. How his feet must have pressed
into ground until it was no longer apart from the earth, the earth

merely allowing the soles to part at each step,
pounding home, backpack laced over his head. I know

he scrubbed & scrubbed the shoes long after
their demise—or revival—in sharp motions

like the soldiers dusting their hands. No entry to
Gwang-ju, schoolboys sprinting home the wrong

way, the feet of the students much like those of
the soldiers: bloody & patchworked with wary

intention. Marching perhaps knowing they too
may go extinct a mutilated body and nothing more,

hanging by one incisor.

/

after Franny Choi

Make me three kingdoms. Make me

a continent of sires so wide and endless

they ride like stars in expansion,

thunderously back in time. Hooves

clattering in tandem, metal animals,

great city beasts. What is a horse

if not a vehicle to test its rider, much like

the A-train bucking through Saturday mornings,

gears trembling into slot. Traversing the great

kingdom of transit lines and given enough

berth even Genghis would’ve thought you

fearsome. You say, They’re afraid.

They tell me to go back

to my empire. He says, Defiance

is what propelled the horses.

/

 

“I was born a woman but never lived as a woman.”

for Kim Hak-Sun, who died without an apology

All I think about is the clean separation of whole objects no blood. Cars and street poles and

Trauma shears can cut through almost anything. Leather and
            denim to turn the victim face-up to the heavens,

as if to say Look what you’ve done or Look what you can save,
            because made in His image means holding everything against hope,

as if it counts. Do not ask me about cutting. Once, the umbilical was
            torn from a child because the child was borne from tearing too—

Skin sloughed from bone to settle in ox bone broth, hanbok in violent sep
            aration from a girl’s milky skin. Lured by promise of work

and made to give up the flesh in cycles of centuries. How surgically
          brutal the division of cloth and body, of girl and machine,

of woman and her entire life. Of comfort / and / woman, units of war supplies,
          they were called. Made in His image is the arrogance to mold a woman

into what she is not, oil-slicked fingers trying to press metal. A war
          never atoned. Do not ask me about cutting again, until each bullet

is returned in the shape of their names.

 

Letters from Pennsylvania to Washington: for Ellie Chu

“Gravity is matter’s response to loneliness” – Ellie Chu; The Half of It (2020)

Twice a day, you signal the trains because
          you don’t trust light to guide metal. Lift your arm

and the engine surges forth. Give crossing
          bells to the girl you love and she says it’s like being

a master of the universe—the way gravity holds
          every atom in place. See, I’m not like you.

I can’t hold acceleration in my fist, I choke
          my brakes on every hill. But I live near a train

station because it promises movement, steel hurtling
         across steel, an escape hatch that skins my knees

as I crawl out. After coming out, you stand
          in a church and everyone gasps as I applaud.

After sunset, I kneel at the platform, kiss
          my knees to the line, and baptize my hands on rust. God.

I curl my fingers and no particles align,
          no girl sucks my name in her mouth, but I’m learning

Newton’s laws—objects in motion stay in motion.
          So when you take the overnight train to your future

city, let me run next to the tracks. Let me
chase your smoke as we rush, together, to our better lives.

Let’s pray we never stop.