Winners announced in annual Emily Pestana-Mason Poetry Contest

The annual Emily Pestana-Mason Poetry Contest winners were recently named at East Georgia State College. Emily Thompson was the first place winner, Elizabeth Wilkie of Richmond Hill took second place, and third place went to Mohmedyamin Chhipa of Wrightsville.
Thompson’s first place poem was titled ardens sed… “A quick search revealed to me that the phrase ‘ardens sed’ is a Latin motto meaning ‘burning but flourishing’ and that it has roots in the image of the biblical description of the burning bush,” said judge Chris Mattingly. “I must say that, when I first read the title, I did not consider its Latin root. In fact, I first interpreted the title by its sound, which I first thought to be a type of rendered dialect rooted in the soil of the rural Deep South.” Mattingly was not far off, as most of the poem’s meaning is rooted in sound. “I love the way the title bleeds rhythmically into the first line and gives the impression (when heard not seen) of someone being spoken to.”
He goes on to describe the poem as a surprise of Biblical allusion, family stories and sorry. “I love how the ordinary is transformed glorious in this stanza, or, rather, how the glorious is transformed from a Biblical metaphor into a household plant inserted literally into the poem by the speaker, which then turns again into the ‘drowning eyes’ of the speaker’s daddy. There’s so much anguish in this moment because we somehow feel the speaker implicated in the father’s suffering because his eyes are equated with the bush that she herself has planted. Wow. But then, of course, there is that final stanza where, like the burning bush, the eyes begin to speak: ‘learn/how a/ man expired, but/ never died.’ And these are the lines that made this reader stop everything he was doing, fold up the poem, and put it in my pocket so that I could read it again and again and again.”
Wilkie’s second place poem, Where I’m From, attempts to define the speaker’s place of origin. “I like these kinds of poems,” said Mattingly. “Especially when a poet—like the one behind Where I’m From—uses imagery to do the work of evoking that place. The images here are clear, rich and
complicated. And they come to us like cards laid down on a table, one after another. This poem gives us dogs, rabbits, magnolias, sand, clay, mountains and marsh and blends them with the almost forbidden hints of closer, more personal stories—ones rooted in vandalism, of anxiety and
fleeing. I think this mix of pretty images and darker stories insinuated gives us an overall picture that is poignant, authentic and deeply relatable.”
Mattingly goes on to say, “This poem acknowledges the beauty alongside the anguish of hardship and tough decision. This poet knows that where they are from is not just a place on a map. They, like all of us, are from a geography made of experiences and memories, which are rendered with
great power throughout the four stanzas of this poem.”
Wilkie, the daughter of Steven and Angela Wilke, is an EGSC-Statesboro student and plans to transfer to Georgia Southern University in the fall to major in Japanese Language and minor in Geology. She currently lives in Claxton but calls Richmond Hill her hometown. She plans on being a
geologist and translator working overseas. She says she began writing due to her father’s profession as a high school English teacher, and says she has met a lot of creative people online who inspired her to start writing. She and her best friend are currently editing a novel that took them over four
years to complete.