2023 Contest Results
The High Marsh Press is very pleased to announce Kate Kennedy as the winner and Angela Waldie as the runner-up in this year’s chapbook contest. A huge thank you to everybody who participated and took the time to submit.
Winner
The winner of the inaugural Deborah Wills Chapbook contest is Kate Kennedy for her manuscript Ledges.
Kate’s chapbook will be produced in a limited-edition by students from the printmaking program at Mount Allison University, featuring a letterpress-printed jacket, and will be published by The High Marsh Press in the spring of 2024.
Judge’s citation for the winning manuscript
Each of the dozen poems in Ledges places us “on the edge of leaving,” then drags us right back to the downtown streetlights we all might otherwise have left behind. So what at first seem to be practical tools reveal, with scrutiny, another species of utility: a bench turned wobbly coffee table, an unused hand-smithed hook, a living-room plane without its workshop, Egyptian goddesses and wayward lexicons cozied up against a good old dog and a squatting Kamloops ranch-hand. While it might be true that “Sometimes it is the long black edge / of nothing” that matters most in these poems, it’s also a moonrise over an aunt’s shoulder that overtakes the story. Here are poems where the underpass declares who lives here, not the welcome signs. The windows (seen through windows) these worlds open offer, in the end, not just thoughtful beauty, but also ways forward, through and with the trees, where all of us end up “braced against the mountain’s incline / before continuing down / into the valley, home.”
Judge’s citation for the runner-up
A Single Syllable of Wild offers a close-up view of the natural world necessarily complicated by the ways in which we humans keep on moving through its valleys. Here, the bears are not only tagged and dying on the highway, but also ferociously free and moving; the lichens and Woodland Caribou remain, resilient and true; and each dammed stream eventually reclaims its flood basin. So even though we enter these poems with a “pack heavy with rivers,” each current spills out as we move through every page’s waters; and the further we go, contour line by contour line, the more these poems offer us exactly the sort of map each of us could use right now: “old growth deep enough to dream in.”
Runner-up
Honourable mention goes to Angela Waldie for her manuscript A Single Syllable of Wild.
Working with students from the printmaking department at Mount Allison University, one of the poems from A Single Syllable of Wind will be produced as a limited-edition letterpress broadside and published by The High Marsh Press.
About Kate Kennedy
Kate Kennedy is a poet, editor, and reviewer. Her poetry has been published in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, and Maisonneuve, among other journals, and has twice been selected for The Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Originally from Lillooet, BC, Kate spent many years in the Maritimes before returning to her home province. She now lives and works in Victoria.
About Angela Waldie
Angela Waldie teaches at Mount Royal University in Calgary. She has recently finished her first poetry collection, entitled A Single Syllable of Wild, which explores wildlife conservation practices in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks. She has published poetry in The Antigonish Review, Event, Freefall, The Goose, The New Forum, Paperbark Literary Magazine, Prairie Fire, and various anthologies.
About the 2023 Judge
Rob Winger is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, most recently It Doesn't Matter What We Meant (McClelland & Stewart, 2021). His work has been nominated for a Governor General's Award, Trillium Book Award for poetry, and Ottawa Book Award, won a CBC Literary Award, and has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada, including the Best Canadian series. Rob lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches English and creative writing at Trent University.
Photo: Sarah Kilian
Photo: Kristal Davis