I entered my poem “Ode to la Conquista” in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest by Winning Writers and it won an Honorable Mention this month.
This poem is a sonnet, and one of the poems from my chapbook manuscript “How to Ride a Train in the Andes” which is unpublished and looking for a publisher.
Judge Soma Mei Sheng Frazier had this to say about the poem:
“Ode to la Conquista“ by Lupita Eyde-Tucker
This ceremonious ode, with its rich imagery, shrewd metaphor and mesmerizing anaphora, lays bare the savagery of human exploit. Like Ferrero’s opera, like colonization itself, the poem gives and takes—yielding beauty “to bet a kingdom on,” then reproaching with “brine rotting on boards / shrieks of secret spoils in island forests.”
“Ode to la Conquista” first appeared in Raleigh Review’s Spring 2020 print edition.
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Lupita Eyde-Tucker is a bilingual poet and translator raised in New Jersey and Guayaquil, Ecuador. She is the winner of the 2021 Unbound Book Festival Emerging Poet Award, the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize, and in 2018 was selected as an AWP Writer to Writer Mentee by poet Maggie Smith. In 2022 she was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize from Letras Latinas. Lupita is completing an MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry at the University of Florida, and will be a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Translators Conference in June 2023. 
Not Enough Poetry 
Please let me know what you think of this poem. I love comments!