Hello.

You’ve arrived at the fourth issue of SHARKPACK Annual, themed ‘Longform.’ The Annual is sister to SHARKPACK Poetry Review and Fathom Books.

The SHARKPACK is essentially insurrectionary—set in fire against a contemporary literary backdrop sick with talk-verse, popular acquiescence, and limp sentimentality. We seek and celebrate the Brut, avant-garde, acid, Sublime, high lyric, Neo-Gnostic, dire, Other.

This issue marks the first time we’ve awarded two Prospero Prizes.

Winner ETHAN HON's poems "Such-like Curiosities" and "Artificial Intelligence" are leggy like a bot, caught in the midst of something like 'rational sensuality.' They recognize neither the imperative for lyricism nor the progress of narrative; movement is shot through with mind's own intimate, rebounding Pause. And in winner JULIAN MITHRA's "Ship Wreck" and "Homilies for Horsetails" we are challenged by sonic cheek in poems whose speakers feel pulled tight, rack-to-rack: 'So much salt / out of the sea shouldn't be happening,’ says Julian. This is singing under the knife.

Hon and Mithra both receive $150.

We’re also happy to include single-poem samples from the finalists for our PITCH VIPER PRIZE, Julia Lewis and Devon Balwit. Lewis’ How to Hypnotize a Lobster is out from Fathom Books in spring, 2018.

A further happy announcement, bruv: ‘Longform’ marks our final all-digital installation. Oui: SHARKPACK Annual becomes a print journal with web content beginning 2018. To celebrate, Fathom will publish a SHARKPACK Annual SELECTS this winter, with poems, prose, and poetics pulled from the Annual and SPR, 2014-2017. View the cover and authors here! More to follow.

For now, please enjoy this issue of long poems, an essay, and an extended series of video game stills by Connor Sherlock.

For more on the SHARKPACK, here.

To submit your work to our next paperbook Annual, themed ‘Play,’ here.

To contact the editor with a general question, here.