PRISM is excited to share the winning pieces from our 2021 Pacific Poetry Contest along with Cecily Nicholson’s judge’s essay.
Cecily Nicholson is the author of three books, most recently Wayside Sang, which won the Governor General’s award for English-language poetry. She lives on Qayqayt territory along the river known as the Stó:lō, and volunteers with communities impacted by carcerality. Cecily has been hosted by such spaces as the Holloway Series at UC Berkeley, New York University’s Tisch School, Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, and the Surrey School District. She was the 2021 Writer-in-Residence for the University of Windsor.
Judge’s Essay
I am grateful for the opportunity to comb through the selected poems for this contest. Between them were noticeable entanglements, cross references to everyday conditions of grief and forbearance that accompany restrictions in movement and times of perpetual crises. These works have thought through conditions of labour and forced journeys. They notice the limits of technology and refuse historical lots, purpose, and category.
Considering data and what the “news knows,” my second selection, To the End of Redaction, is savvy and concerned, thinking through systemic extraction as mega and meta relations to body—what does the “news” tell you, and what will we know in the end? Selected for third place the poem A Group of Sixty-Seven, after Jin-Me Yoon’s A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 is methodical and thorough as it speaks to new art history, studying, and responding to visual culture. This critical eye is alert on behalf of the reader and viewer, dismantling codified exchanges in multiple medias while determining viable ways for a particular artwork to communicate further.
Brilliant configurations were afoot in these poems. I learned from what was shared and was relieved to empathize with the collective body of work submitted. I meditated on “pacific” and “spirit” when I selected Waves to Leave, or Waves from a wealth of peers. This poem… bears a struggle to situate and to come to terms with the meaning of journeys that so many of us are forced to continue. Against a warbling present, deep in the weight of memory and essentially drowning, the poem shares these underwater gasps of light present in jewel tones of possibility. May we “saturate the mind with good, with leagues, with bioluminescence” amid the rising tides of systemic indifference.
And now onto the pieces themselves! Click the title of the work to read it in full.
Grand Prize
“Ways to Leave, or Waves” by Miguel Perez
Miguel Martin Perez (he/him) is a queer Afro-Dominican poet from Harlem and the South Bronx. He is an MFA alum from the University of California in Riverside and currently resides in Los Angeles. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Acentos Review, Raleigh Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, Beyond Words, and Riddled with Arrows.
First Runner-up
“To the End of Redaction” by Anna Lee-Popham
Anna Lee-Popham is an editor, poet, and writer living in Tkaronto (Toronto), Canada. She is the co-host of the Emerging Writers Reading Series, an editor at HELD Magazine, and an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. A recipient of the Janice Colbert Poetry Award, her recent writing has been published in Canthius and Autostraddle and shortlisted for the Fiddlehead Creative Nonfiction Contest.
Second Runner-up
“A Group of Sixty-Seven after Jin-Me Yoon’s A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996” by Alice Turski
Alice Turski received her MFA from Cornell University, where she also taught creative writing and literature. A finalist for the 2021 Gatewood Book Prize, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, The Iowa Review, The Greensboro Review, Copper Nickel, Iron Horse Literary Review, and more. She has been awarded residencies from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Anna LaBastille Memorial, and the La Napoule Art Foundation, and is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of British Columbia.
A big thanks to Cecily Nicholson for taking the time and space to select these three winning pieces. Congratulations again to Miguel, Anna, and Alice!
Don’t forget that our Grouse Grind Contest for V. Short Forms is open until April 15/2022. Check out the details and submit here.