West Trade Review Prize for Poetry 2025
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
May 20, 2025
West Trade Review is happy to announce the results for our fourth annual West Trade Review Prize for Poetry contest.
GRAND PRIZE ($1000 & publication in the spring 2025 print edition): Ezra Fox ("What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing")
Ezra Fox lives and writes in San Francisco, CA. Ezra's writing explores the tensions between lineage, queer identity, and spirituality as they intersect with concepts of impermanence and non-duality. A Lambda Literary's 2025 Writers Retreat Fellow and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship for promising transgender writers, Ezra's work appears in TriQuarterly, EcoTheo Review, Zócalo Public Square, Zone 3, and elsewhere. They were also a finalist for Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and Birdcoat Quarterly's Editors' Choice Prize in Poetry. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net, and follow Ezra on Instagram @ezraxfox.
"'A person puts forth a surface of legible order as they move through the everyday, but underneath that surface are the roiling energies of what’s dark, what’s broken. 'What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing' is a brilliant riff on that tension between interior and exterior. The poem broods on the self’s origami-like delicacy and keys-between-knuckles brutality. Restlessly moving from line to line and intensity to intensity, 'What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing' nevertheless has a keen lyric control, like needles threading shadow to skin." -Rick Barot, Contest Judge
Look for Ezra's poem in the spring 2026 print edition of West Trade Review.
Honorable Mention: Kyle Okeke ("The Image of God")
Kyle Okeke is a writer from Sugar Land, Texas,whose work has appeared in POETRY, and other literary journals. He was awarded the Evaristo Prize in African Poetry and the Poetry Society of America Chapbook fellowship. He is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at UT Austin's New Writers Project.
"“'he Image of God' is both familiar and strange. It’s ostensibly about a family drama, but its perspective is grounded in an idiosyncratically local way of seeing and saying. The poem is steeped in a storyteller’s intimate voice, but it also has a cinematic scope of vision, where what people do has a 'slow translucency' and memory is as tough and opaque as alabaster." -Rick Barot, Contest Judge
Honorable Mention: Lindsey Brown ("Thin Places")
Lindsey Brown
"Like an Alexander Calder mobile that hovers in the air bearing an asymmetrical equilibrium, 'Thin Places' is fine and compact and yet holds in balance enormous things: faith and skepticism, wonder and grief. I applaud this poem’s understanding that it’s in those seemingly quiet moments of a day—in those 'thin places'—that deep perception breaks through." -Rick Barot, Contest Judge
Look for Lindsey's poem in the Summer 2025 print edition of West Trade Review.
Lindsey Brown (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in psychology. In both poetry and psychology, Lindsey is interested in how we communicate about our inner worlds. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in the 2 River View and the Spoon River Poetry Review.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
2025 Contest Judge: Rick Barot
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His earlier collections include The Darker Fall, Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord, all published by Sarabande Books. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. His newest book of poems, Moving the Bones, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.
