Winner of the 2026 Choeofpleirn Press Poetry Chapbook Contest
The Sky Is Always Finishing
"Bradley Samore beholds the world with a tender clarity that bears witness to all things in their singular aliveness. Elegiac and deeply moving, The Sky is Always Finishing pays tribute to family, boyhood, moonlight, music, and the losses that make us who we are. Like the great haiku poets, Samore grasps the intertwining of the ephemeral and the eternal; he utilizes, intuitively, the poem as a portal to a time when each beloved was alive and guiding him into who he was — and is — becoming. And so, life continues. And we discover, within Samore’s lyrical memory-scapes, something 'more durable than dying.' This collection is a marvel to behold — a gift and a balm for all who know grief’s shaking."
— Brynn Saito, author of Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023) and winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award
"The Sky Is Always Finishing is a collection with the arc of a novel that aches with sentiment yet is never sentimental, encouraging us to fall in love with this 'quick life,' even as we know its gorgeous music and staccato cadences shall pass."
"Musical time as much as passing time informs these poems, and Samore is adept in his descriptive rendering of instrumentation. Imagining his uncle listening to the album he found left on his turntable, Samore writes in 'Stolen Moments' of 'Eric Dolphy navigating the fog with his flute/ like a great horned owl.' With a subtle music of its own, The Sky is Always Finishing marks an auspicious beginning."
"The Sky is Always Finishing is unafraid to sit with grief, meditate upon the vastness of the natural, and arrive at the very heart of existence. In his debut chapbook, Bradley Samore confronts the loss of his mother and family with an unflinching tenderness in his narrative poetics where he animates and reanimates the memory of those who have gone before him and the flora that constellates our collective experience."
— Michael Bazzett, author of Cloudwatcher (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), winner of the Stern Prize
— Anthony Cody, author of The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023) and winner of the Whiting Award
— Carol Moldaw, author of Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024) and winner of The FIELD Prize
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