Winner 2024 EROTIC Contest: Poetry
On Miranda’s poem, judge Stephanie Cawley writes: “In the middle of ‘The Monster is God,’ the poet writes, ‘yes — no,’ the dash a stark bridge where the erotic emerges, in the tension between self and other, giving in and restraint, pleasure and pain, the world as it is and the world as it could be. ‘The Monster is God’ doesn’t just write about the erotic, in its many dimensions, but evokes it. The poem itself disorients, it undoes, it flirts, it repels, it subsumes, and, in the end, it obliterates, it swallows the reader and the poem itself whole into its inky, ‘monstrous horizon.'”
Gabriel Miranda is an emergent two-spirit Puerto Rican poet and religious anthropologist living in NYC. He won the Empyrean Literary Magazine first place prize for poetry, has been published in two literary journals, and was selected as a Woodward Residency poet-in-residence. He spends his days contemplating the threads between what was ancient and is now modern as he weaves a new dream of creative expression.