Not Winning the William Carlos Williams Award New Best Way to Get Thoughtful Critique

Question: Has anyone ever read the slush pile as assiduously as Ronald Silliman?
His long-running catalog of the non-winning WCW books on his bloggo should give us all hope that if and when we get the silly notion to send poems off to a contest that the judges will actually read the work--not just glance mockingly at our fonts in between slurpy bites of Pepperoni Hot Pocket. (That is, after all, how all contest readers read, right? Otherwise they TOTALLY would have picked my manuscript! That Hot Pocket was too good! It distracted them from my genius! Screw you, Hot Pocket!)

Anyways, M. Silliman has a post up now about Laura Solomon’s Blue and Red Things, a book I picked up from Firehouse Books in Ames, Iowa for super cheap and gobbled in one sitting only to be drawn back again and again (and again, still). She’s a friend of mine—so I’m, what’s the word, biased--but she’s a friend now gone from the United States so Blue and Red Things is a book of absence for me, and not just because it’s primary mode is elegiac. I miss lines like these before I even finish reading them:

How many stitches did you get
Brother ghost
your tantrums rooster me up
Come home with me
My nice is so tired
Let me see your stitches
My body and yours is
only a situation
a wrung sponge held dry underwater
Come home with me
Let me show you my models
I will bake you some bread
Here are the rocks
I would have gathered for you

Reading Ron’s take (“So long as we have poets like Laura Solomon, we have hope.”) got me thinking again about the book, and though I don’t see quite as much of the Northeast coterie in it as he does (to me there’s a lot more of the South despite the snow and "Ted," but whatevs), I like his parsing of Solomon’s irony-sincerity nexus. It’s so arty you’ll boo-hoo in your beer. In my dreams you’re alive and crying. Here’s another taste:

why is it not as nice
to sit in silence
inside the house
as outside it
the twiggy tree has
pink glass on it
now the moon
is looking shorter
and the orange lamp leaps
across the street