Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2015: Editor’s Choice
Photograph by Ana Prundaru. “The View from the Café” was written by Matt Quinn for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2015, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner.
Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “I love the way that this poem turns the photograph into a vignette that we can all enter, as readers. There is something uncanny about the image, juxtaposed against recent newspaper photographs of Syrian refugees, and Quinn manages to articulate and then illuminate that uneasy feeling.”
Note: This poem has been published exclusively online as part of our monthly Ekphrastic Challenge, in which we ask poets to respond to an image provided by a selected artist. This October, the image was a photograph by Ana Prundaru. We received 115 entries, and the artist and Rattle’s editor each chose their favorite. Ana Prundaru’s choice was posted the previous Friday. For more information on the Ekphrastic Challenge visit its page. See other poets’ responses or post your own by joining our Facebook group.