Congratulations to Ciaran Berry on being awarded a Pushcart Prize for his poem ‘Circus, Fire’. This poem was originally published in American Poetry Review and selected from there for inclusion in Pushcart Prize L: Best of the Small Presses. It was subsequently published in States (Gallery Books, 2025).
The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in their annual collections. The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60’s and 70’s.
In States, Ciaran Berry offers poems that are attentive to the cinema of the moment and the film that becomes the life. They meditate on everything from the blockbuster to the B-movie, and there’s the footage from the author’s own life, offering an encounter with the increasingly dis-United States, where he has now lived for more than a quarter of a century, and with an Ireland he recognizes more and more only through memory. Often we find him in transit, looking down on clouds during a transatlantic flight or driving his newborn son home through the snows of Connecticut. What does it mean to be an alien of any kind?, he asks.
