The Coda Poet Prize Summer 2026
Laureate
Jennifer Browne
In A Period of Absence, Arenology
In a Period of Absence, Arenology remained with us. Through its careful attention to language, landscape, and transformation, the poem creates a space where observation becomes reflection and reflection becomes feeling. Its formal restraint allows its emotional depth to emerge gradually, revealing new layers with each return.
For its intelligence, precision, and lasting resonance, we are pleased to name In a Period of Absence, Arenology the winner of the inaugural Coda Poet Prize.
Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. She is the author of American Crow Beltway Editions and the poetry chapbooks Before: After, In a Period of Absence, a Lake, whisper song, and The Salt of the Geologic World. Find more of her work here.
Shortlist
From an exceptional field of submissions, the following poems were selected for the shortlist of the inaugural Coda Poet Prize. While only one poem could ultimately receive the award, each of these works remained under consideration through the final stages of judging and represents writing of exceptional merit.
The editorial citations below reflect some of the qualities that distinguished these poems and contributed to their selection.
In addition to being recognized as shortlisted works, these poems will be collected in CODA, the inaugural annual poetry volume of The Fifth Corner, to be published in January 2027. Alongside the winning poem, the shortlisted works will form a permanent record of the first year of the Coda Poet Prize.
We are pleased to recognize the following shortlisted poets.
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Before Each Storm An Eye: a sestina
For its command of form and its richly layered imagination. The poem moves between the personal and the mythic, transforming recurring images into a meditation on inheritance, survival, and self-making. Each return deepens the poem’s emotional resonance, revealing new dimensions of its world.
Carol Burbank
Choice
For its richly imagined narrative voice and its unerring sense of atmosphere. Drawing on the language of fairy tale while resisting its certainties, the poem creates a world at once intimate and uncanny, where tenderness and danger remain inseparable.
Freya Sacksen
Blood In The Gutters
For its fearless engagement with form and its delight in uncertainty. Moving between visual art, narrative, and lyric, the poem inhabits the charged space between what is shown and what remains hidden, discovering genuine feeling within its own acts of invention.
Shane Neilson
Craw
For its distinctive voice and uncompromising vision. Moving fluidly between the classical and the contemporary, the poem transforms questions of illness, healing, and memory into something at once deeply personal and expansively human. Its language remains startling, exact, and unforgettable.