Thank you to everyone who voted in the Book Spine Poetry Contest Poll! The results are in.
The top three winners will win a t-shirt with a poetry joke on it. (Hope you enjoy.) Winners, please send me a private email so I can send you the details, get your sizes, etc.
Thanks again, everyone, for participating!
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1st place: “Combined and uneven apocalypse” by Maia Almeida-Amir
Combined and uneven apocalypse Living in the end times Utopia Our history is still being written
2nd place: “In other worlds” by Cindy Clayton
In other worlds: A thousand splendid suns. The lake of dreams, The summer tree— Everyone is beautiful. . The rest of life: Something rotten. Crime and punishment, Truth and consequences— The places that scare you. . I am the messenger: Good omens! The wake of forgiveness.
3rd place: “Raising My Teen” by Laine Little
Blood and faith Lost The last battle Between parent and child No more misbehavin’ Celebration of discipline
We had a lot of great entries in the Book Spine Poetry Contest. First, I want to thank everyone who participated! I hope you enjoyed playing as much as I enjoyed seeing your poems. Second, as promised, here are all the entries (listed in no particular order) so you can all enjoy them, too. I’ve transcribed the lines of the poems in the captions in case you have difficulty reading some of the spines in the photos.
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Three from Lauren Nagel:
How to think like Leonardo da Vinci Know your own mindDictionary Thesaurus The elements of grammar Me talk pretty one dayLadies’ own erotica Get lucky Can’t wait to get to heaven
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from Paula Billups:
Der Steppenwolf Goatwalking Pathways to bliss Beyond good and evil My world and welcome to it
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from Maia Almeida-Amir:
Combined and uneven apocalypse Living in the end times Utopia Our history is still being written
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from Cindy Clayton (who also provided with her entry a text version with her intended punctuation, so I’ll use that for the caption):
In other worlds: A thousand splendid suns. The lake of dreams, The summer tree— Everyone is beautiful. . The rest of life: Something rotten. Crime and punishment, Truth and consequences— The places that scare you. . I am the messenger: Good omens! The wake of forgiveness.
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from Laine Little (entitled “Raising My Teen”):
Blood and faith Lost The last battle Between parent and child No more misbehavin’ Celebration of discipline
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There you have it! If you sent me an entry and don’t see it here, I apologize. Please email me right away so we can sort it out.
Now, part of the reason it took me so long to get this post done has to do with my being out of town for a few days during an unusually busy time at school and having to play catch-up all week. But part of it is that, frankly, I can’t really decide who has won! So many of these poems are just fantastic.
So I’m putting the fate of this contest in your hands, dear readers. Below is a poll in which YOU decide which are the best entries! The poems are listed by their first lines. Polling will be open until the evening of Monday, May 20th. I’m going to try and set this up so you can vote each day, if you want to, to make this sort of like approval voting. First, second, and third place entries will win a prize! Winners will be announced the week polling ends.
Thank you for voting! Please spread the word to others to do so.
Hello! There are so many great entries for the Book Spine Poetry Contest! Thank you so much to everyone who participated. I’ve just gotten back into town from a conference, the incredibly fun DFWCon, an annual writers’ conference put on by the DFW Writers’ Workshop, and I have a bit of catching up to do. Look for more on the contest results by the end of this week.
Hey there. So today’s the last day of April. How did it sneak up on us so quickly? Well, if you’re in education, the answer is easy: we’ve hit that point in the school year when no one can get any traction because everything is so hectic and stressful. Ah well.
Because I’m in this position, too — and because I didn’t announce this contest until April 6th — I’m extending the deadline for this contest till the end of this coming weekend. We’ve had several wonderful entries so far — and thanks to all who’ve submitted! — but I’m getting ready for a writers’ conference this weekend and buried in grading. Like I tell my students when they want an extension, “Sure, take an extra day, because I wasn’t going to be grading this paper tonight anyway.”
New deadline is this Sunday night, May 5th. Winner gets a t-shirt. Submit as many entries as you like. There is no age requirement to enter. Click here for the full details.
I tried to make a funny connection between the title of today’s post and the Barenaked Ladies’ breakout hit “One Week,” but I decided instead not to force it and to see whether you could come up with one. Can you? Can you?? If so, please post it in the comments section here.
Otherwise, here is your reminder that this year’s National Poetry Month contest ends one week from today. Not sure what this contest is? Click here for more details! It’s super fun. We’ve had relatively few entries so far, too, so your chances are winning are better than usual.
You have until April 30th, 2013, to compose a short poem or story comprised entirely of the words on the spines of books. Each composition must be the contest entrant’s own original work. To enter the contest, email a picture of your entry to me at forest.of.diamonds@gmail.com with the subject line “BOOK SPINE POETRY CONTEST ENTRY.” (Please do NOT leave your entry here in the comments section, although if you foresee having difficulty emailing your entry to me, you may explain why here in the comments section, and we’ll work it out.) There is no limit to how many times you may enter, as long as you do so before the end of this month.
For a multitude of glorious examples which I won’t picture here because of copyright issues, check out these images of book spine poetry from Google search.
All entries will be featured here on Sappho’s Torque. The winner will be selected by a volunteer panel of writers and will receive a t-shirt with a hilarious Emily Dickinson joke on it.
Thank you for playing, and good luck!
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Please note: The deadline for this contest has been extended to Sunday night, May 5th, 2013. Good luck!
Just a reminder: The deadline for the photo caption contest is this Sunday night, unless someone asks me to extend it. Prize is guest blogger spot here!
Now, if you please, come up with a little story to go with it! No more than 250 words, please — just leave your entry in the comments section. Deadline is this coming Sunday 11/25 at 11:59 p.m. central time.
I’ll try to make a poll for the entries, and then the winner of the readers’ choice poll will win a guest blogger spot here on Sappho’s Torque, on a mutually agreed upon date. Won’t that be fun?? Yes! Yes, it will!
For all those of you in the U.S. and all you U.S. ex-pats out there, Happy Thanksgiving. If you have a holiday this week, then you have some free time. Enter this story contest. And if you don’t have a holiday and/or free time this week, enter it anyway, because nothing says procrastination like entering an internet contest.
Cheers! 🙂
P.S. — Please feel free to spread the word about this opportunity. I’d love to see how far this thing can go.
So the incredibly awesome blogger Byronic Man has this Weekly Question of the Week thing, and each time he asks one of these thoughtful delights, his readers can send in lots of answers and then the top choices get picked to be voted on in a poll. (I think that’s how it works.) Anyway, this weekend, one of my responses was tapped to be a candidate. Woo-hoo!
So please mosey on over to his blog and vote for me. You can, in fact, vote once per day, so please do! (And voting for me each time would be AWESOME, by the way. I’m just sayin’.)
A while back, SJ over at Snobbery won a contest here on Sappho’s Torque, and her reward was to have a guest blogger spot. This week we’re featuring her post, a book review of a novel my rising-9th-grade niece is currently enjoying. I hope you enjoy her review! Be sure to check SJ out on her blog and on Twitter and on Facebook. Super delightful stuff.
And just as a quick reminder, you still have four days left to enter the Chindogu Challenge.
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book cover photo borrowed respectfully from Goodreads
Look, I loved the IDEA behind this book, but I felt it was a little lacking in execution. I was expecting something of a faerie tale version of Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always(which I have read and re-read because it succeeds where I think this book fails) – a book for younger readers (if I MUST pin a YA label on it, I will) that parents and adults can enjoy as well.
What I found, though, was a book that read as if it were geared towards adults either attempting to regain that childlike sense of whimsy, or reminisce about those fantastic books they read as children.
Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot about this book that I think was done right – but I can’t imagine any children I know being particularly interested in it. I know (for example) that if I handed this book to my almost 13-year-old (who loves faerie stories, btw – he’s my son, after all), he would probably read about 10 pages before handing it back to me and saying, “Nah. Can I go read some more Barsoom?” …or A Series of Unfortunate Events, or The Looking Glass Wars, or whatever else it is that he’s into at that point in time.
This is a book that is marketed as being for children, but when I read it, it seemed like it was clearly written for adults.
That bothered me, and is why I have to append the “ish” to my answer of whether I liked it or not.
What did I love?
Well, that’s a lot more fun to talk about!
First of all, there are some absolutely delightful illustrations by Spanish artist Ana Juan, they were a lot of fun to come across, and each one made me smile.
The fantastic characters we meet in Fairyland were wonderfully realized. I cared about them all, especially the Wyverary.
What’s a Wyverary? Simple! It’s a wyvern whose father was a library!
Look! A Wyverary! (image respectfully borrowed from Amazon)
I appreciated the slightly dense/flowery prose, but that’s another reason I think younger readers might have problems with it. It really read like it was a faerie story I would have enjoyed when I was younger, but it was a little…more, I think. Like I said – some adults will squeal over it, but children will probably just stare blankly.
Final verdict? If you’re an adult that still loves faerie tales, this book will probably scratch an itch you didn’t even know you had. If you’re not…you should probably skip it, as you’ll likely find it a bit too twee.
Sappho's Torque 