The winning poems and photographs of the inaugural Bare Hands Poetry & Photography Competition 2012 will be turned into a beautiful postcard and we will distribute these postcards to leading independent bookshops in Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto & Vancouver. The names of all those highly commended will also be mentioned. They’ll be free so people can just pick them up!

Poetry Category Winners

Julianne Sibiski & Julia Deakin

Highly Commended

Colm Keegan, Kate Dempsey, Brian Kirk & Samantha Fisher

Photography Category Winners

Olly Griffin & Kate Seibert

Highly Commended

Briana Hornsby, Anders Nilsson, Claire Tupman & Tatyana Stepanova

All copyright remains with the poets and photographers.

Biographies

Julianne Sibiski, like her work, is something dead and very much alive. Growing up just beyond the restless breath of the great-lunged city of Philadelphia, she might have already been published in a broad-minded anthology or at least a handful of delightfully obscure literary journals had she not been exceedingly preoccupied with living and traveling through 11 states of Mexico, learning how to de-bone a chicken in under 15 seconds, falling in love with a man pouring coffee, finding her heart in the palm of her sister’s hand, her voice in Paris, France, and perfecting the art of the run-on sentence. Philadelphia, New York, London, Paris and Berlin have all been sounding boards for her poetic expression through spokenword and slam performances.  Her simplest and highest ambition is to never cease giving a passionate voice to every beautiful paradox (for in all things there is beauty and in all things there is paradox) while wittingly mistaking herself for a purposeful hypocrisy. 

She cannot boast of critical acclaim or even pundit disdain, but she has such profound belief and love for words and their simultaneous magnitude and powerlessness to write them as they come to her, in peace and with pain, flowing through her interminably; a rhetorical medium for the poetry, without which, her life would be an inaccuracy. 

Julia Deakin was born in Nuneaton, England and teaches at the University of Bradford. Her work is widely published and she has read on Radio 4’s Poetry Please. The Half-Mile-High Club was a Poetry Business competition winner andher first collection, Without a Dog (Graft 2008) impressed both Anne Stevenson and Simon Armitage. She has won several poetry competitions including four in 2011. Her second collection is due out soon.

Kate Seibert is a photographer from Upstate NY who felt compelled to start documenting life when she was 13. She enjoys the challenge of finding the best ways to capture the intangible connections, fleeting moments and sensations that make us all so similar and so different. She now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her here:www.kateseibert.com

Olly Griffin is a self-employed Sport and Physical Therapist based in Tipperary Town, Ireland. His photography has been published in The Irish Independent and The Sunday Times, as well as being a regular contributor for the Tipperary People magazine. In 2012 he was awarded second prize in the Sunday Times Travel Photography Competition. Follow Olly on twitter @16thManMunster

Brian Kirk lives in Clondalkin, Dublin. He has been shortlisted for various awards including Hennessy Awards in 2008 and 2011. His stories and poems have appeared in the Sunday Tribune, The Stony Thursday Book, Crannog, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs, Cancan and various anthologies. He blogs at: http://briankirkwriter.com/

Colm Keegan has read and performed his poetry at various festivals, including the Flat Lakes Festival, Electric Picnic and the Festival of World Cultures. He was the All Ireland Slam Poetry Champion in 2010. He also writes short stories and screenplays and has been shortlisted four times for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award for both poetry and fiction. In 2008 he was shortlisted for the International Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition. In 2011 he was nominated for the Absolut Fringe’s ‘Little Gem’ Award for the play Three Men Talking About Things They Kinda Know About (co-written with Kalle Ryan and Stephen James Smith) which is touring 2012/2013.  He is a poetry/arts reviewer and contributing poet for RTE Radio One’s nightly arts show ARENA and co-founder of ‘Nighthawks at the Cobalt’. He is co-founder and facilitator of Inklinks, a young writers club in Clondalkin and teaches creative writing in secondary schools across Ireland. He maintains a popular blog and his poetry performances are widely viewed on YouTube. He is currently finishing his first novel.

Kate Dempsey’s poetry is widely published in Ireland and the UK She won the Plough Prize for a short poem. Her dinky poetry book Some Poems was published in 2011 by The Moth Editions.

Anders Nilssonwas born in Olofström, in the south of Sweden. Photographer, Writer and Short Film maker. Studied Media, TV production, Screenwriting, Film and Literature. Director and writer of the short film “Black Coffee, please” which won first prize at the Fotogrammi d’Europa festival in Florence, Italy 2007. The Federation of Swedish Farmers’ culture award (for one of my photographs) in 2008. Second prize at the IBE (International Bureau of Epilepsy) Golden Jubilee Photography Competition 2011. Currently living in Göteborg, on the swedish west coast. 
Visit his website www.andersn.se 

Claire Tupman lives in Derby in the UK with her husband Paul. The image is of her mum’s hand after she had been gardening one day and she thought it would be perfect for the Bare hands competition. She is passionate about all styles of photography and specialises in child portraiture. You can view more of her work at www.tupmanphotography.co.uk

Briana Hornsby grew up in Chicago, Illinois, where she started taking photos at age 4. In 2010 - 2011 she interned with photographer Marc Hauser. Briana graduated from Evanston High School in 2011 and has been taking a gap year between high school and college. This year has led her to explore India, Spain and Morocco. Her photo, “The Potter’s Hands,” was taken in Jaipur, Indiana, at a blue pottery studio. Briana will continue her studies at Seattle University in the fall of 2012. 

Samantha Fisher is a poet returning to the writing scene after a many months away, and enjoying every minute of it! She is a world traveling, jewelry making, painting, book reading, clothing sewing, letter sending lady who is finding joy in the discoveries that come with new directions in life. She lives part time in Amsterdam with a boy she loves and spends the rest of her time in northern Michigan with the greatest friends and family in the whole universe.

Tatyana Stepanova is fifteen years old and lives in Russia, in Omskaya state, Siberia. In her own words -  ”I love to travel. This is my hobby. This occupation gives me a lot of impressions and emotions that I bring a photo. I like to study because knowledge is useful sometimes. I am sociable, so I have got a lot of friends among my schoolmates. I love sports. This is my passion. I especially love skiing. in them appeals to me the rate, beautiful scenery, mountains, and the emotions that remain long after the trip. I skate skiing for 4 years and I think that in future I will continue to engage in this sport.I love animals. I do not have pets at home, but I really want a dog. From an early age, I write poems on different topics. When I was younger I had many hobbies, but now I do not have time to do it.   I love taking  photograph and I hope will enjoy my work.”

because I see you. and what is more, I see your hands.

they’re not belonging to just one life like all others are,

others which simply grasp and turn and rotate down

like clocks in an empty room.
no, yours are those which rise up from themselves,

lift and descend like a gravityless creature.

and while all discoveries and progress and world-wisdom
remain yet on the surface of life,
your hands hold to the depth it,

to the undersecrets of whatever it is we think we understand.

but anyone might see your hands.

of this I am aware. 

it was, then, only the night when I felt them. felt them.

felt nothing but the awareness of some great primordial creation
which was never meant to belong.

as if one day misplaced by the keeper of such entities,

they tumbled and fell among earthly things,

seen,

yet still too beautiful to be captured,

even in a lie.

Sooner or later they will have
the conversation about hands.

You’ve got [such and such] hands 
one will say, watching the other 
raise a cup, spoon, book, paper –
yours are/mine are/look/let’s see. 

Side by side then palm to palm, 
skin to skin, finger to finger
tip to tip, they’ll size up shape,
colour, muscle – scrutinise nails. 
 
An aftertouch of heat, moisture,
pressure – then the world will shift
on its axis and the light slant
ever so slightly differently.

I want you to bury me 
in damp bedclothes, 

and I want you to touch me 
with those same hands that hold books 
and steering wheels and food.

I want you to be sand and
dew grass and rain on me. 

I want you to whisper 
the things you would only say 
if you knew we were dying.

I want you to tangle your wishes 
in the veins that show purple through my skin, and then

I want you to unravel everything 
you’ve been told about why we are here.

You were fetching towels when the hurt came on

a groan exploded, drenched me

it was now

you said I could do it by myself

instinct, no thinking,

strained until a warm pain came, a give

slither of a blood-crusted girl.

I wiped her down,

her perfect nose, curled doll hands,

blew so she breathed, pinked, didn’t cry

just stared with new blue eyes.

Look, I said, what shall we name her?

Nada, rien, niks, nothing

she’s nothing

and she was nothing more.

As the fronds of an uprooted fern
will crave the air they left;
the memory of wetter
weather say, the heather
clinging to spongy earth,
the sense of tannin coloured
water running over rocks
licked smooth by glaciers.

So the fabric of unbuttoned clothes
smolder in your wardrobe
for the swirl of elsewhere;
a hand felt on a dancefloor,
skin brushed in a corridor,
a cheek against your neck.

And the air here still
holds your breath,
will not forget being
moved by your words;
the mark of you
on a silent room