Able Muse Book Award · Poetry Manuscript
Jared Carter
Winner — 2026 Able Muse Book Award
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2026 Able Muse Book Award
Selected by final judge, Annie Finch
Winner
Jared Carter
for his poetry manuscript Heart’s Forest
Coming soon from Able Muse Press — Spring/Summer 2027.
The contest runners-up and honorable mentions are listed here.
About the Poet
Jared Carter’s Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. His most recent book of poems, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. He lives in Indiana.
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Sample Poems
from Jared Carter’s Heart’s Forest
Scythe
It hangs on a peg in the barn.
No one is left
Who could sharpen it now. No arm
reaches the heft
And angle of blade through the grass,
leaving the rows
Fallen and still. No mowers pass,
clockwise and close,
Circling the field, almost rowing,
stepping ahead
To part the swath, each one knowing
his neighbor’s tread.
Ivory-Bill
I fled you, down the nights and down
the narrow days,
Fled piney woods and little towns
where nothing pays,
Fled endless rows of cotton tilled,
fled chainsaw whine
And clear-cut stand, and barrels filled
with turpentine.
I fled out through the last few trees
and vanished there,
As sunlight fades. As when the breeze
becomes still air.
Fragment
It is part of a woman’s face,
broken off now
And canceled, except for the grace
of those lips. How
Much damage was done, for that smile
to emerge from
The stone? For that grace to beguile?
Once you were one
Who sensed the uncanny, the strange.
Then came the call
About changing your life. You changed
nothing at all.