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“Letter to My Former Selves” by Lydia Kwa Wins the Earle Birney Poetry Prize

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.

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Where Statues Once Stood: On Rachel Cusk’s Kudos

Review by Will Preston

There’s a moment towards the end of Kudos, the final installment of Rachel Cusk’s groundbreaking Outline trilogy, when the whole work—hundreds of pages of characters and conversation—abruptly and elegantly folds in on itself, smaller and smaller until, like a magic trick, it fits inside a single, luminous image. On her way to dinner in an unnamed European country, our narrator, Faye, is pulled off on a detour by her companion. Their destination is an old church that was completely ravaged by fire some fifty years earlier: the paintings and statues destroyed, the stonework “split into two by the heat.” Instead of restoring the church, Faye’s companion explains, the damaged interior was left untouched and reopened for worship. On her first visit, she had found the blackened interior so distressing she had wanted to scream. But then she realized the scorched walls were covered with something like images, ghostly shapes and textures left by the flames:

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Get to Know: Our Jacob Zilber Prize Winners

We’re so excited to introduce you to our Jacob Zilber prize winners, whose pieces you can read in our Summer issue, 56.4. The characters in these stories transport a dead body along a bourbon-hued river in the Philippines, hunt for the perfect pig-feet in Seoul and come to understand their pasts in the woven strands of carpets. Let’s get to know the minds behind these complex worlds.

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