F.I. and Joel Goldhaber, poet and authors of science fiction and fantasy

May 12, 2026

"Cassandra Complex"

The Amphibian Issue 10 Spring/Summer '26, Memory, includes my poem "Cassandra Complex".

For the culturally amphibious, The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal welcomes work by writers, poets, and artists from all different backgrounds who "live in two cultures at once ... countries, gender, language, ancestors, neuro-divergence..."

You can also read "Cassandra Complex" as a poetry broadside with the image of "Cassandra" mourning Troy's destruction as painted by Evelyn De Morgan in 1898.

erbacce-prize for poetry long list

I currently have enough poems to fill three additional books of poetry. I've gone so far as to designate which poems should go into which books and that's about it.

So when the erbacce-prize for poetry rolled around this year, I jammed together five pages of poems from the longest of the three and sent it off. (Entries are required to represent "sufficient poetry to fill about 90+ pages" which, depending on how the poems are spaced, seems quite reasonable for this particular collection in which I'm planning to include more than 100 poems.)

Unlike most poetry contests or submissions, instead of five poems one-to-a-page, the erbacce-prize for poetry asks for five pages of poetry, as long as there are clear divisions between each poem (such as three tildes ~~~ on a single line 😉). Since most of the poems in this book are quite short, this allowed me to enter 23 poems representing the eight different poetic forms featured in the book I plan to title Playing with Form.

Much to my surprise (and delight) I received notification on May 2 that mine was one of only 114 entries selected (one of only 13 from the U.S.) from just over ten thousand submissions to be "discussed in depth and declared to be of special merit". The long list includes poets from 30 countries and all but one continent. (The contest received "submissions from almost every single country in the world".)

Based in Liverpool, England, the erbacce-prize for poetry claims to be "The biggest, most prestigious, poetry competition in the world." First prize is publication of the winner's poetry collection by erbacce-press. One runner-up will also have a book published (but without as many perks) and the judges will select four poets to be featured in the twice-annual erbacce-poetry-journal. (According to the website, 'erbacce' rhymes with 'apache' (er-ba-chee) and stems from Italian for 'weed'.")