Madeleine Cravens, winner of the 2024 Narrative Prize, is the author of the poetry collection Pleasure Principle (Scribner, 2024). She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she lives in Oakland, California.

Photo credit: Yael Malka


READ THE 2024 NARRATIVE PRIZE PRESS RELEASE


A LISTING OF NARRATIVE
PRIZE WINNERS


October Phone Call and Other Poems

by Madeleine Cravens


October Phone Call

Listen to Madeleine Cravens read this poem:

I tell Meg I feel dead and she says
you’re not dead you’re just not in New York.
It’s true, there is no music when I lock myself
inside my car, when I pay the toll to cross
the bridge and can’t even see the water.
The man at the Chevron on Perkins tells me
to be happy through the slat above the register:
he says each day is a new chance to pray.

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