Longlisted from 21,254 entries in the National Poetry Competition. No prize, no certificate—just a line that matters: the judges “kept coming back.” This is what that means in practice, and why it sends you straight back to the notebook.
Circuit
Circuit follows a collective voice trapped in a dry crypt, pacing the same worn path for centuries. With no decay to mark time and no release from hunger, the poem reduces existence to function, repetition, and the thin persistence of hope.
Flobadobegium
Flobadobegium begins with a problem: how to name what refuses arrangement. Borrowing from children’s television and botanical language, it turns to weeds—those persistent, misnamed presences that outlast intention—and follows them through systems of naming that never quite hold.
A Version Of Effort
A Version Of Effort traces a morning shaped by pain, motion, and intrusive voices, where running becomes both compulsion and experiment. Drawing on surrealist logic, the poem holds tight to rhyme and rhythm to mirror the body under strain—step, step, step, lurch—until even brief relief carries its cost.
When Truth Drowned
When Truth Drowned: Written and read by Dennis Johnstone. A long-form poem shaped by Old English cadence, where competing certainties fail to grasp the whole. Months in the making, it follows pressure building at the edge—until the wall, and the story, give way.
Instruction
The wood doesn’t teach in any generous sense. It doesn’t guide or explain. It stays where it is. The lesson comes through contact—misjudged space, a fixed boundary, and the body forced to recalibrate. Not metaphor. Impact.
