PRISM international is proud to announce the winner of the 2017 Earle Birney Poetry Prize is Lydia Kwa for her poem “Letter to My Former Selves” published in PRISM 56.1: Liminal, available now!

Earle Birney established UBC’s MFA program in Creative Writing in 1965–the first university program in Canada. The Earle Birney Poetry Prize, awarded annually and worth $500, is PRISM‘s only in-house prize. A very special thanks to Mme. Justice Wailan Low for her generous and ongoing support.

Letter to My Former Selves

by Lydia Kwa

I haven’t forgotten that I relied on all of you, to arrive in this present moment. Tasting an occasional hint of self-deception, yet eventually I must admit, we’re inseparable.  You, with vast oceans of feelings and thoughts that reach a rare, distant shore.

You had yearned so much. Keening through seasons of deprivation, you would hide or shrink into others’ shadows, hoping you would not offend. Whose house had you inhabited? Whose rules did you live by?

Attuned to the other in excessive devotion. Not love, but unquestioned sacrifice.

I know now—you had yearned for the impossible. Gazing out to those who could not possibly know. And even if they had glimpsed your odd ways, they had become too frightened to draw near.

You knew rejection better than your own spirit. You lived it until your skin announced the betrayal.

Why had you treated truth like a bitter poison you had better not ingest? As if it were an exile you could not allow into your home?

A truth that did not reside elsewhere, except adrift as a ghost in your own mind. Echoing through abandoned rooms of memory.  A stranger wandering familiar corridors. Or was truth embedded instead in the innermost folds, waiting determinedly for your return?

I gaze into the mirror. Your shadows announce you. 

Quietly dwelling, I listen. Outside, loss and disaster. Harsh edges of deprivation and sorrow. Vibrations from those who touch.

The house is silent and full. The house is no longer lonely, having become unfettered. Solitude is rich.

Sad, tender, slightly shivering with the enormity, trembling as the past falls away, and I too disappear.

Lydia Kwa is based in Vancouver as a writer, artist and psychologist. She grew up in Singapore then went to University of Toronto and Queen’s University for her degrees in psychology. Kwa has published in various literary magazines and anthologies since 1989. Her first book, The Colours of Heroines (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1994) led George Woodcock to write that she is a writer of almost “Proustian intensity” (BC Bookworld, 1994). Kwa’s first novel This Place Called Absence (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 2000) was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Prize. Her next novel The Walking Boy (Key Porter, 2005) was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Book Award in BC. Pulse (Key Porter Books, 2010) has been re-issued by Ethos Books in Singapore (2014). sinuous is a book-length poem that was published in 2013 (Turnstone Press). Kwa’s novel Oracle Bone was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017.  She will be releasing a revised edition of The Walking Boy with Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring 2019. Kwa has shown her artwork at Centre A and WePress in Vancouver. She has also produced a chapbook titled linguistic tantrums (2013, 2016).

Photo Credit: Ronnie Lee Hill Photography