This year’s competition judge is Brecken Hancock. Her poetry book, Broom, Broom, published with Coach House Press, won the Trillium Award in 2015. She has also published poems with Grain, Fiddlehead, and CV2, and served as reviews editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. She lives in Ottawa.
The Department of English would like to congratulate the winners of the 2021 Annual Poetry Competitions!
Lilian I. Found Award for Poetry Winner: Cherie Blanquart for “Geology 3”
Feedback from Judge Hancock: This poem stands out for its sensuality (“Bees fizz against your skin”; “smoke and sloe in the corner of your eye”) and the gentleness of the central relationship (“Together you sink to the bottom of a memory of a lake”; “He’ll hold your hand, geode-cradled”). Dimensions of time fracture and overlap, adding a surreal, metamorphic quality: things change into other things (“Crack open a year and find a thousand years. Crack open a mountain and there’s a lake, a slow dance, another mountain”), and bits of the world, the universe, burnish the body (“When you were born, twigs exploded into white moths, but by now… They pepper your face while you sleep”). This poem celebrates how—although human life measured against geological time seems small—our short-lived bodies touch and integrate with the earth (“runs his hands across the rim of a canyon”), and we never entirely pass away.
George Johnston Poetry Award 1st Prize Winner: Karuna Vellino for “The 80’s”
Feedback from Judge Hancock: This poem’s elision of time creates dislocation, confusion, anxiety. While it insists it’s about “The 80’s,” it evokes our current moment—with a recent “TV star criminal for president” and fears that “this virus” is creating the “graves in your dreams” that “aren’t really dreams anymore.” The effect of remembering the HIV pandemic while we live through a new global health crisis is a reverberating bleakness: we are destined to live and relive the trauma of “your heart in a hospital bed / slipping away without a hand to hold.” While the poem memorializes HIV’s victims—“a killer of the poor and the pansies”—there’s a shadow statement here: COVID’s death toll is disproportionate and, like HIV, the national response has been politicized, throwing entrenched inequality into devastating relief. Brilliantly, by writing about the bereavement of loved ones lost three decades ago, this poem captures and amplifies our collective grief of the ones we are losing right now.
George Johnston Poetry Award 2nd Prize Winner: Jean Christian Furaha Ishimwe for “Turn and Tear Apart / Revolution”
Feedback from Judge Hancock: The repetition in this poem perfectly supports its message of cyclicality and the relentless energy it takes to “turn and tear apart” “the order of things, / “things as we know them” in a fight for social justice, human rights, equity. The speaker calls attention to the etymological roots of the word “revolution” (“to raise hands in purposeful mischief”), while exploiting its other meaning—movement in a circular course, to turn over and over. The struggle to “Turn and tear apart / again and again / … / the regimes of power / … / a ruthless weight” and create a new world of “radical kindness” is recurring and repetitive. Rather than exhausting itself in the effort to communicate this pattern, the poem uses repetition to build momentum, to find the energy to “raise hell and / disrupt” to “Begin again and again.”
George Johnston Poetry Award 3rd Prize Winner: Melanie Rustenburg for “Dlah jah nen?”
Feedback from Judge Hancock: The speaker in this poem invites us to share in a special bond between grandmother and grandchild that is beyond words, beyond language (She did not speak English, and I barely spoke Dené / We still had fun in our special way”). Moments and images of specific shared humour (“Asking her to say spaghetti… / she’d say ‘spa-get-is’ and we would laugh”); song (“Singing George Jones, in my own annoying style / ‘HE STOPPED LOVING HER TOOOOODAYYYY’”); and slapstick (“She’d pretend to slap me, a small flick of the wrist / quickly followed by a laugh”) infuse the depiction of this relationship with energy and playfulness. This poem celebrates the elder/youth dynamic and special way of understanding one another, “being cheeky” together. In the end readers want to dwell with these two charismatic characters to witness what they’ll do next.
Honorable Mentions go to:
Aalya McGugan for “Fast Food”
Feedback from Judge Hancock: The grease, sweat and “Orange e v e r y w h e r e” in this poem paint an oppressive atmosphere of the fast food joint where the speaker works, building toward abusive customers and the realization that every shift is “A headache, a nightmare, a disaster.” But another thread runs through the poem too: a thread of agency. Repetition of the word trying emphasizes a striving (“trying to make a few bucks for my savings,” “trying to do my job,” “trying to force a smile”). Even in the last line, the speaker takes accountability for the job, for wanting to work fast food, thereby asserting agency in the face of the oppressive atmosphere and abusive customers—claiming a voice and a future, offering a lens on the world.
Sarah Waddington for “The Sadness”
Feedback from Judge Hancock: The form of this poem announces its content—the crush of text running into itself echoes the crush of emotion, how sadness overwhelms. The speaker reflects on a personal battle with depression, punctuating the narrative with questions directed at the reader—“Do you remember the first time it happened to you”—enlisting the reader in the fight for mental health. At moments throughout the poem, the speaker insists “I’m better now,” and the poem ends on “I’m better now.” But by the time we get there, we’ve been educated on sadness and we know that recovery is transient and temporary.