announcing the winner of the 2024 cow creek chapbook prize:
standard time by dante di stefano​
from judge traci brimhall:
​​“Each of these poems speaks to the dead and the living as they move through different passages of time, whether the brief expanse of a day or of history. The titles often want to offer us a generous clarity while observing the bewildering world. There’s a gorgeous lyricism, but also a bare vulnerability, a deep listening to the heartbeat beneath the poem. Di Stefano utilizes so much skill in crafting these poems, but it’s the profound and moving humanity in them that moved me most. These poems reoriented the atoms in my heart.”​​
“In Standard Time, Dante Di Stefano proves that everything is poetry, from the sparrow outside your doorstep to the ‘sparrow / stuck inside a poet’s throat.’ These poems carry us past sorrow, trauma, and despair to the open hand of the ‘lyric-now,’ where the blinking light of a cursor ricochets between lullaby and land acknowledgement, between aching knuckle and ars poetica. Di Stefano invokes literary figures as disparate as Anne Carson’s Sappho and Eric Carle (of The Hungry Caterpillar fame), as he speaks to friends, contemporary poets, coworkers, family, and ‘to whomever is reading’ him; this is a chapbook of community, an act of resistance and joy. As Di Stefano says of Cormac McCarthy in one poem, I, for one, ‘hear a great great writer whispering,’ on every page. Each poem in Standard Time leaves me more grateful for the beautiful gift of the minutes, seconds, and hours, it is so easy to take for granted.”​
—Leah Umansky, author of The Barbarous Century and Of Tyrant
Dante Di Stefano is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, the book-length poem, Midwhistle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Best American Poetry 2018, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Binghamton University. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize (UK), the Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, among others. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018) and lives in Endwell, NY with his wife and two children.