The Orchard Street Press is very pleased to announce the release of Quiet Diamonds 2026, the ninth edition of our annual poetry journal composed of poems submitted to the 2026 Orchard Street Press Poetry Contest.
Thoughts on Quiet Diamonds 2026
What is this world? Is it perfect, or imperfect? How do we define ourselves? What can we salvage of those we’ve lost?
Addressing these conundrums, Quiet Diamonds 2026 brims with natural imagery: rivers and oceans, forests and meadows, dawn and dusk, wind, rain, and snow. Birds skim through these pages or sit motionless on trees or shores. Excavating both personal and public history, these poets reclaim people and places that shaped them.
These writers revel in metaphor, one comparing herself to an unruly garden, another (in the prize-winning poem) likening sunrise to a foundry pouring out “molten light.” Incident can define the self, but metaphor often captures a time and personality both succinctly and engagingly, as when one poet says: “I was buzzing against the jar of Catholic girls’ school.” Amid moving descriptions of loss (“There is nothing left to inhale / on the empty pillow / except the scent of absence”) are memories of finding and celebrating what seemed forever lost forever. What a fine anthology of prize-winning poets so in tune with life and language.
Poet Mary Makofske, previous winner of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize
“Come hold me while I ponder. Ponder my confusion,” Jennifer Phillips writes in her prize-winning poem from this always rewarding, sometimes dazzling new collection. These poems inhabit many places, situations, and moods: here you’ll find deserts and rivers, new loves and lost lovers, children and elders, some happy, others wounded. Trusty (if sometimes reckless) guides to a world they find by turns beautiful, harsh, confusing, and our only home, these poets have found words and images to explore, engage, and sustain themselves (and us) within it.
Jeff Gundy, author of Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems
Quiet Diamonds 2026 is available (both via this site and the mail) for $17.00 from
The Orchard Street Press
P.O. Box 280
Gates Mills, OH 44040
330-264-7733