A huge thank you all the poets who submitted their work to this year’s competition. It’s no mean feat to go through your poems and agonise over which ones to include in a collection. It’s always hard to know what a judge may or may not like. So I’d like to thank all you poets for trusting Pocketry with your work. It’s always a pleasure and a delight to read work from fresh voices!

Themes and subjects of the collections included childhood, parenting, relationships, love, grief, hospitals and illness, homelessness, nature and writing. It was wonderful to see poets try different forms including sonnets, free verse, haikus, tercets and couplets as well as a using a range of poetic devices such as rhyme, metaphor, personification and simile.

Ans now, without further ado, Pocketry is pleased to announce Lakshmi R. Kanchi as the 2021 Pocketry Prize for Unpublished Poets winner with their collection, imagick.

Lakshmi's collection will be published by Pocketry and will be available to purchase in Pocketry's online shop.

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There were three highly commended entries:

earthlings by Kristina Deminick,

Beyond the eucalypts by Steph Amir and

Clear Answers by Zoe Simmons.

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For poets looking to improve their submissions, I recommend reading the submission guidelines carefully. Make sure your poems meet the required line lengths and widths and do not exceed the maximum number of poems if you want your entry to be considered. All entries are judged blind without knowing who the author is so do not put your name anywhere on your document or in the file name. If you do, your entry is immediately disqualified.

In judging the prize, I was looking for poems that were relatable, universal and spoke to the experience of being human. The poems that stood out used evocative language, vivid images and had a strong sense time / place or personality. They also had a solid grasp of form and demonstrated various poetic devices including enjambment, metaphor, repetition and rhyme.

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Thank you once again to all the poets who submitted their entries to the Pocketry Prize for Unpublished Poets. It was wonderful to see so many emerging poets writing to such a high standard.