The Issue 48 Poetry Round-Up!
From Pulp Literature Issue 48, find the winners of the 2025 Magpie Award for Poetry! Enjoy the opening stanzas of these winning poems, as chosen by final judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar, below.
To read these poems in full, be sure to check out Issue 48, Autumn 2025.
Widening Circles
by Pattie Palmer-Baker
So, I ask the Canada goose
perched in front of his mate,
his coffee-coloured wings
fanned out to hide his only
love from the seagull’s stilled
menace, what will you do
when she is gone, dead or lost
in a cloud’s chiffon swelling?
Pattie Palmer-Baker lives in Portland, Oregon, a city known for nurturing artists and poets. For many years, she exhibited mixed-media artwork: paste paper collages combined with her poetry in calligraphic form. To her surprise and delight, viewers often responded more strongly to the poems than to the visual art. Encouraged by this, she now focuses primarily on writing.
Her poetry has appeared in Bacopa Literary Review, Military Experience and the Arts, Ghazal Page, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Calyx, and Phantom Drift. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her work has earned First Prize, Timberline Review (2016); Bivona Prize, Ageless Authors Anthology (2019); and First Prize, Oprelle Oxbow Contest (2022). She is the author of the chapbook The Color of Goodbye (Kelsay Press, 2021) and the full-length collection Five Fundamental Forces (MoonPath Press, 2023).
Pattie’s poem ‘The Dahlia Truth’ was an honourable mention in the inaugural Kingfisher Poetry Prize and appeared in Pulp Literature Issue 42, Spring 2024.
Shutter speed
by Angela Rebrec
After a photo of Serbian paramilitaries, known as Arkan’s Tigers, fighting against Muslims during the first battle in the Bosnian war in Bijeljina, Bosnia (1992, Ron Haviv), and conversations with war photographer Steven Schwartz on his experiences in Sarajevo (1992–96).
The photojournalist is fast
enough to capture
the mother clutching her child
close enough
to see the soldier’s face
expressionless
as he pulls
trigger
The photojournalist hesitates
adjusts the frame, then another photo
though it does not capture the breath before the shot
or the way the mother pressed the child’s head to her chest
as if her bones could stop the bullet
Angela Rebrec is a writer and arts organizer dedicated to building a vibrant, inclusive community for writers of all backgrounds and abilities. In 2021, she founded the Delta Literary Arts Society on the ancestral lands of the Tsawwassen, Musqueam, and Kwantlen peoples, aiming to bring this vision to life.
Her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including EVENT, Vallum, and The Antigonish Review, and her poetry films have been recognized at international festivals such as the Filmmaker Life Awards. She was the 2024 winner of Pulp Literature’s Magpie Award for Poetry and a recent graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
Angela has collaborated with composers and visual artists to co-create multidisciplinary works that explore connection and shared experience. She believes the most meaningful art, and the best of ourselves, emerges through collaboration. Her work has previously appeared in Pulp Literature issues 18 and 44.
Unread Books Air Their Complaints
by Elizabeth Cockle
We deserve better than It’s not you, it’s me,
promised you a whirlwind through
the glittery skyscrapers, seedy underbelly
of Tokyo, Mumbai, cities on opposite coasts
where people go to make it. We tantalized you
with the fizz of falling head over Prada heels
for a CEO, a wounded Marine, the boy next door,
the boy in the next cubicle. Offered heroines
who work in marketing just like you.
Elizabeth Cockle is a sustainability communicator and author of the chapbook Growing Up Skipper® Stands Up to the Haters. Her poetry has been published in Bonsai Journal, Parody Poetry, and the anthology We’ve Got Some Things to Say: Reshaping Narratives Around Sexual Violence from Amherst Writers & Artists Press. She was longlisted for the 2024 Kingfisher Poetry Prize. Elizabeth stocks Free Little Libraries in her East End Toronto neighbourhood to the best of her book-hoarding abilities.
To continue reading these poems, pick up a copy of Issue 48, Autumn 2025!
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