We’re excited to announce that the following poems have been longlisted for the 2017 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize contest!
Thank you to everyone who submitted. Check back soon for the shortlist announcement, followed by the winners chosen by this year’s contest judge, Aisha Sasha John!
Review by Peter Takach
You are about to read a review of Thomas Trofimuk’s new novel. Perhaps you’ve seen This is All a Lie reclining against the shelf at your local bookstore, its stark white cover a breath of sanity amidst more lurid neighbours. Hesitantly, you ease it off the shelf, for you’ve been hurt before. Still, you remain optimistic that, somewhere past the bland bestsellers and the remainder bin, the perfect paperback awaits you.
Continue reading The Novel That Lies Before Us: Thomas Trofimuk’s This is All a Lie
Review by Deborah Vail
Steven Peters makes an impressive entrance into the world of speculative fiction with his debut novel, 59 Glass Bridges, which began as his thesis project while studying English at the University of Calgary. Inspired in part by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the fifty-nine bridges in Peters’ hometown of Calgary, and his memories, this story is dark, evocative, and compelling.
Continue reading Cutting to the Core of Humanity: Steven Peters’ 59 Glass Bridges
PRISM international editors had a difficult time choosing a few books they read and loved this year, but managed to whittle down two to three picks each: Jessica Johns, promotions editor, picks: This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson It...
Thalia Field is from Chicago. She worked in theatre as a writer, director, and producer before beginning to write books. Thalia has lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, and New York, as well as spending many summers in Juneau,...
Our Poetry and Prose editors had a difficult time sifting through all this past year’s fantastic writing in search of our six nominees for The Pushcart Prize, but reminiscing about all of their favourite pieces was a bonus! Thank you to all the contributors who made the task both difficult and rewarding. Below is our list of nominations for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.
Jill Talbot was the grand prize winner of our inaugural Grouse Ground Lit Prize for V Short Forms! Read her winning piece, “Girls,” and get it in print in our Liminal issue 56.1! Eliza here is obsessed with memes,...
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation and is a PhD student in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His work has been widely published in magazines across Canada, and he has been named by Tracey Lindberg as one of six Indigenous writers to watch. In Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection with Frontenac House, This Wound is a World, love answers heartbreak, “history lays itself bare” (42) and a world glimmering with decolonial love and queer, Indigenous possibilities is split open. This is poetry at its brightest. It is electric, profound, necessary work. Belcourt bends genre, challenging the cage of colonialism through a poetics of intimacy. It is a collection unafraid to ask questions, exploring grief, desire, queer sexuality and Indigeneity with tender honesty. Belcourt asks us to consider the ways Indigenous bodies can be simultaneously unbound and “rendered again,” (40) how worlds can be made and unmade. These are poems to be returned to again and again with reverence. PRISM editors, Jessica Johns and Selina Boan were thrilled to be able to sit down with Billy-Ray during his Vancouver book launch and chat about Indian Time, queer Indigenous futures, and the armpit as heaven’s wormhole.
Continue reading Everything is Something Else: In Conversation with Billy-Ray Belcourt
Reminder! PRISM international is offering free entries for self-identifying Indigenous writers for our Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction contest! This contest is being judged by the amazing Thalia Field, and closes on January 15, 2018. Indigenous writers are invited to submit by emailing assistant@prismmagazine.ca by...