Synkroniciti is thrilled to announce the winner of our “Haunting” poetry contest, Andrea L. Fry’s “Memento Mori.” We had wonderful poetry submitted for this theme and there were ten finalists:
“Memento Mori” was chosen for its imagery, which combines the abstract and the concrete in an extremely unique and satisfying fashion. The ineffable takes the shape of an imagined lion, both guarding and threatening us in its symbolic function, as Andrea views the Ossuary in Naples, full of the exposed bones of the dead. It was also chosen for the power of the final couplet, which is rhymed in Shakespearean fashion–the poem does not have a rhyme scheme until that couplet–and links the individual with the human collective through death, that inevitable and irrevocable state we all experience. Andrea weaves the intellectual with the visceral, and it is the visceral, with a solemn brutality, that has the final word. I’ll have more details and analysis in Andrea’s artist feature later this month. This is a chilling and profound poem that I found irresistible. Synkroniciti nominated it for a Pushcart earlier this month.
You will want to read “Memento Mori” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Andrea L. Fry has published two collections of poetry, The Bottle Diggers, in 2017 (Turning Point Press), and Poisons & Antidotes (Deerbrook Editions) in 2021. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stanford Literary Review, The Sun, and Women’s Review of Books, among others. She was a finalist in Georgia College’s Arts & Letters Prize contest, a semi-finalist in the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and a semi-finalist in River Styx International Poetry Contest. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.
She is a freshly retired oncology nurse practitioner and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband and two comical felines. Her website is www.andrealfry.com.