Sugar's 2012 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Sugar House Review's excited to announce our 2012 Pushchart Prize nominations:

• Rob Carney’s “A Lesson Every Shipwreck Learns Too Late”
• Steven Cramer’s from Clangings, [Mother said you count your friends on one hand…]
• Amy Eisner’s “Wasting Water”
• Kate Greenstreet’s “719”
• Jay Hopler’s “That Necessary Evil”
• Carl Phillips’s “Your Body Down in Gold”

It's never easy to pick just six out of so many amazing poems. So, a special thanks to all of our 2012 contributors--obviously, without you, there is no Sugar.

Sugary Year

It's been a full year for Sugar so far. AWP was insane and great; we met a lot of contributors and subscribers, which is always nice. We sold out of our the Fall/Winter 2011 issue (at least what we brought with us), which is also nice.

In the past month we launched our 6th issue, Spring/Summer 2012, and while it took longer than planned to get it ready, it was worth the extra time. Contributor and subscriber copies finally shipped this week. We're proud of this issue, so if you're not a subscriber, you should find out how to get your hands on one.

Also this last month, we found out Patricia Smith's poem "Laugh Your Troubles Away," from our Fall/Winter 2011 issue, won a Pushcart prize and will be featured in the 2013 anthology, due out in the fall. We felt lucky just to get Patricia Smith's poems in our pages, and feel much more than lucky to have our second Pushcart winner. (The issues with Pushcart-winning poems are available for purchase on our website: #1 Fall/Winter 2009, #5 Fall/Winter 2011.)

To sum this up, we are overwhelmed by the good things Sugar's been able to be a part of in the first part of 2012 (and the two years previous). Our next issue will mark three years (!). For the four of us who founded the magazine (Natalie, Nathaniel, Jerry and John), it seems pretty crazy. This endeavor is a lot more work than we anticipated, but it's also has much bigger rewards than we expected. Thanks for supporting us. We couldn't do it without you--subscribers, contributors, volunteers, submitters, event attenders, candy eaters, etc.

We have yet to figure out how to be good blog keepers, but we're hoping someday soon, we'll get it better at it. Thanks for being patient.

Pushcart Prize Nominations

Sugar House Review is lucky and honored and still amazed to have Paul Muldoon's poem from our first issue (Fall/Winter 2009) included in Pushcart Prize XXXV--Best of the Small Presses, which is out now and available for purchase. We have a copy and recommend it, not only because of Muldoon's poem, but because it's a great anthology of work, illustrating the wonderful job small presses are doing.

This new Pushcart anthology signals not only a great collection, but also that it's time for this year's nominations. We had a difficult time narrowing it down to six, because we love all of the work we've published this past year. Here are the six poems we nominated:

• Steven Cramer's "Versions of Mandelstam" (v3)
• Yolanda Franklin's "Porch Sitters Sippin' Sweet Tea in Heaven" (v2)
• Randall R. Freisinger's "Alien Sex" (v2)
• William Kloefkorn's "Sundown Syndrome" (v2)
• Janet Sylvester's "Away From the Flock" (v2)
• Pimone Triplett's "I Dream of Jeannie: Parabolic Lens" (v3)

Congratulations to these six poets!

We want to thank all of our contributors--obviously, we wouldn't have any Sugar without you--we appreciate you and your work.