From Our Nest to Yours
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2022 Magpie Award for Poetry, with commentary from final judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar.
2nd Runner-up: ‘BigGermanDialectWordClankinglyInsertedHere!’ by Kevin Spenst
A rollicking ride through history, language, and memoir, all told in long lines deftly assembled to tug at both our hearts and our intellect. There’s so much to marvel here!
1st Runner-up: ‘Harvest’ by Cara Waterfall
Mastery of the short-line tercet gives us Van Gogh in a poetic monologue: the language is rich with painting and image and the claiming of the confessional ‘I’ is enlivened by the strength of sound and rhythm.
Winner: ‘griefbody’ by Cara Waterfall
A beautifully constructed palindrome line poem with a haunting atmosphere made possible by precise syntactical construction. The imagery and sound effects arise from strong verbs, dense with word associations that keep us returning to this lovely elegy that captures attention, subtly, and with echoes that endure.
The three winning poems will appear in Pulp Literature Issue 36, Autumn 2022.
Thank you to all submitting poets for sharing your words and supporting Pulp Literature! And thank you to Renée, for once again lending your time and talent to the Magpies.
See the Winners Announced Live at Our Issue 34 Launch!
A wonderful time was had at our Spring 2022 launch. Watch the replay and listen in as the winning poets read their work and chat with Renée. And check out all that Issue 34 has to offer, with readings and interviews with our fabulous authors and artists! Order your copy here.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Issue 28, ‘Man With Golden Helmet’) was the Surrey Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2018. She is the author of four books and six chapbooks. Her work has been adapted for opera and visual art. Her ground-breaking poetry book about the bombing of Air India Flight 182, children of air india, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Renée’s second book, The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, edited with Wayde Compton, was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her book, Listening to the Bees, co-authored with Dr Mark Winston, won the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award for Environment/Ecology. Bramah and The Beggar Boy, published in 2021, is book one of THOT J BAP, Renée’s epic poetry-in-verse, and features Bramah, a time-travelling locksmith and her orphan-apprentice, The Beggar Boy. Order your copy here.
Ottawa-born and Costa Rica–based, Cara Waterfall has poetry in Best Canadian Poetry, The Fiddlehead, The Night Heron Barks, and more. She won Room’s 2018 Short Forms contest and Room’s 2020 Poetry Contest. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize and a shortlisted candidate for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her poem ‘Harvest’ won the Editors’ Choice Award for Pulp Literature’s 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry, and appears in Issue 33. Cara has a diploma in Poetry and Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU. Visit her at carawaterfall.com.
Kevin Spenst is a Pushcart Poetry nominee and the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse, and over a dozen chapbooks. In 2019, he was writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House. His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications. He co-organizes the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes a chapbook column in subTerrain magazine, is an occasional co-host on Wax Poetic on Co-op Radio, teaches Creative Writing at Vancouver Community College, and is the 2022 Poetry Mentor at SFU’s Writers Studio. Visit him at kevinspenst.com.
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