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“A friend of a friend woke up in India
in a bathtub full of ice, his kidneys gone;
the first love letter I ever wrote got stolen
and locked in a metal drawer with a stranger’s gun.”
So begins the poem “The Most Dangerous of Transplants” by Emily Lloyd, this year’s winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, awarded at the John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets & Poetry, Dec. 11.
Lloyd, a freelance writer and part-time librarian at Delaware Technical and Community College, Georgetown Campus, read selections from her chapbook titled “The Most Daring of Transplants” at the closing evening of the three-day poetry event held at the Historic Milton Theater.
The winning work was selected from a field of 30 entries. About 50 people attended the reading.
Raised in Northern Virginia, Lloyd moved with her partner Melanie Bosman to Milford two and a half years ago.
Both of Lloyd’s parents and her grandfather were born and raised in Delaware. Lloyd said she likes the area’s casual lifestyle and cultural environment.
She calls herself “a first line and last line queen.”
“I’ll have a first line that I really love and a last line that I really love but filling in the rest is like balancing equations,” she says.
Lloyd studied poetry at Oberlin College and George Mason University before becoming a librarian.
Another of Lloyd’s poems, “Things I Haven’t Felt” begins,
“Different, after losing my virginity.
Better, after the medicine took.
Mosquitoes on my skin, before they’ve bitten me.
Profoundly changed, after I read that book.”
Lloyd says writing poetry is like any art form; it is a process of building on an idea and then shaping and reshaping its form.
“For me writing is a lot about arranging things; arranging fragments to get to a truth that might not be there if you didn’t have the rhythm going on and it was like a diary entry.
“Usually I start with a line or fragment and work from there. It’s not a fit of spontaneous, overflowing poetry that just comes. It’s a conscious, crafted thing for me,” she says.
On stage, as she reads her work, Lloyd seems to be transported to the time and place that planted the seed of the poem as in “Work Ethic.”
“My father is kicking my mother out on a school night and I have to be Jackson Pollock tomorrow morning in seventh grade. All day, I’ve tried to brood in the mirror in my father’s shirt, to hang a cigarette from my lip and keep it there throughout my speech.”
Autobiographical? Perhaps, hints Lloyd saying that the self has always been a component of creative writing.
Lloyd’s prize winnings include publication of her manuscript by Argonne House Press of Washington, D.C., $200, two cases of Dogfish Head beer, and a winter weekend retreat at the Cabin-on-the-Pond in Killens State Park.
Her chapbook is available at the John Milton & Co., bookstore and the Dogfish Head brewery, both in Milton.
The Dogfish Head Poetry Prize competition is restricted to poets from Delmarva. Manuscripts for the competition are due each Labor Day. This is the second year Milton-based Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales has sponsored prizes for the event.
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