"Thank you for submitting to the 2021 Disquiet Literary Contest. We received over a thousand entries for this year's contest, many of them of exceptional quality. While we're sorry to say that your entry was not selected to be one of this year's winners, you should know that out of an impressive pool of work, yours made it all the way to the final judges on the shortlist.
In fact, our readers thought your entry skillfully wields the simplicity of its images to make for a vivid, enveloping reading experience. Rather than stretching language through syntactical feats, you trust the humble sentence to relay meaning in a way that is effective and clear. The world exists in your poems from the first line. The pacing [...] is emblematic of what these poems manage to do: make us feel, in transit, that we’ve found some stillness. We hope to see much more of your work in the future."
Fairly stoked to receive this feedback on top of my shortlisting!
