The winner of the Montreal Prize 2022 is
“Glacier” by Claire Wahmanholm
Comments from Lorna Goodison, 2022 Prize Judge
“Glacier” is a cri de cœur for planet Earth. It draws on the poetic traditions of the lament and of the praise song, making an arresting plea to save the world for our children. What is our reality? the poet asks, and the answer is this gorgeous desolation, turning in flawless rhythm from narrative to lyric. The tone is not easily pinned down: there is historic sadness and everyday hope. There are heart-stopping surprises in this poem, as there are in our world today; every one of us knows and feels these changes, and this lyric gives us words to feel and know them better. Great transformation is here imaged and enacted. The glaciers are melting into seawater, rising into tornados. The stanzas of poetry are melting into lines of prose. A mother’s wisdom is changing into her daughters’ lives as she tries to explain to them what is true. None of these changes is reversible: it’s too late. Everywhere the poem shows us climate change and language change, through a cascading stream of simile, metaphor, and repetition that so often makes poetry what it is when it is at its best.
About the author
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions 2019), and Wilder (Milkweed Editions 2018), as well as the chapbook Night Vision (New Michigan Press 2017). Her poems have appeared widely, including in Best New Poets, New Poetry from the Midwest, Washington Square Review, Triquarterly, The Missouri Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, and Copper Nickel. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. clairewahmanholm.com
2022 Competition Finalists
Ladies’ Night Out
by Lynne Burnett
Sturgeon Devouring His Son
by Leanne Dunic
Midwestern Film Summit
by Ash Adams
Home Range Nocturne
by Sam Morley
Today, Yesterday, After My Death
by Maureen Alsop
Theatre
by Anthony Lawrence
Enduring Love
by Miranda Pearson
Autumn
by Leila Chatti
The Venus Effect
by John D. Kelly
The Nighthawk Swallows Its Prey in Flight
by Laura Zacharin
A Killing, Corazon de Madera
by Abigail Ardelle Zammit
achievement
by Ross Belot
Containers
by Moni Brar
The Tiny Saint
by Valerie Picardo
Stuffed Little Puppy
by Dora Rumbold
Easter Candles
by Kelly Norah Drukker
Hamoukar
by Ross Gillett
The Man Who Repairs Electric Chairs Speaks of Art
by Damen O’Brien
Dereliction: And the Ocean Too Weeps
by Salim Bhimji
Mother Takes Molly Home
by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming
Taking Mary Home
by Ann Giard-Chase
Oriole
by Allyson Weekes
The Church in Ruins
by John Foulcher
The Cage
by Jo Gardiner
Peaches
by Margaret Ray
Ocelot
by Sheba Mohammid
Epode (Aftersong)
by Robert Couldry
Old Medicine
by Elizabeth Oxley
On the Writing of a Feminist Poem
by Jessica L. Wilkinson
Dreamt
by Adrienne Braun
Near the Border
by Michelle Porter
Love Jihad
by Ashish George
Aubade
by Khaty Xiong
April, 1986
by Elena Croitoru
Land Bridge
by Nehassaiu deGannes
Our Hands
by Dani Dymond
Epistle
by Allis Hamilton
A Refugee’s Ghazal
by Tejeswini G.S.
ghazal for the child we cannot make
by Kate Barss
Homesick (Letter to Ovid)
by Maureen Scott Harris
Blue Dot
by Alison Braid
Splash Study
by Leigh Lucas
Having Lived in the Light of the Black Sun
by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Nocturne 20 / Away to Nowhere
by Shellie Harwood
gaze
by Rula Jurdi
Retiring to the Desert
by Jessie Jones
Glacier
by Claire Wahmanholm
Ode to the Twenty-First-Century Brain
by Jennifer Fraser
Book of Rachel
by Steve Evans
Letter from Carthage
by Redd Ryder
Colloquy with Your Brain Tumor
by Redd Ryder
Carved Ivory Head of a Woman
by Danielle Legros Georges
The Missing
by Anthony Lawrence
The Misdirection
by Damen O’Brien
Country Dinners
by Elizabeth Oxley
The Opposite of Home
by Kayal Vizhi
Eileen Succumbs from Complications of the Virus Covid-19
by C.W. Emerson
2022 Prize Judge
Lorna Goodison is a major figure in world literature. She was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017–2020), and in 2019 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Goodison has won many other awards for her work, including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry from Yale University, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007). Her Collected Poems was published in 2017 by Carcanet (UK). She is the author of a dozen books of poetry, the most recent of which is Mother Muse (Véhicule Press, 2022). She has also written three collections of short stories, an award winning memoir and a recent collection of essays. Lorna Goodison is Professor Emerita at University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies.
2022 Jury
Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and scholar of transgender theory/expressive culture. He is the author of two collections of poetry -- Sympathetic Little Monster (2016) and Dispatch (2019) -- and his critical writing has been published in Signs, Transgender Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly and elsewhere. Presently, Awkward-Rich is an assistant professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him at www.cawkwardrich.com.
Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections: The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press), and Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, was published in 2019 by Catapult in the US, and has gone on to be translated into eight other languages. Christle's poems have appeared in The New Statesman, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Poetry. In 2021, she was awarded a Howard Foundation Fellowship in Nonfiction, administered by Brown University.
Nabina Das is the author of the poetry collections Sanskarnama, Into the Migrant City, Blue Vessel and the forthcoming Anima and the Narrative Limits, as well as a volume of short fiction and a novel. She's a Charles Wallace, Sangam House, and Sahapedia-UNESCO fellowship alumna, and a MFA (Poetry) from Rutgers-Camden. By training a journalist and Creative Writing teacher, Nabina is a 2016 Commonwealth Writers correspondent, a 2011 New York State Summer Writers Conference alumna, and a 2007 Wesleyan Writers Conference fiction fellowship winner. Nabina has co-edited 40 Under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation and Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent. Her first book of translations, Arise out of the Lock: 50 Bangladeshi Women Poets in English, is published by Balestier Press, UK..
Liz Howard’s debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was published by McClelland and Stewart in June 2021. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, she currently lives, writes, and teaches in Toronto.
Joanne Limburg has published three books of poetry with Bloodaxe, including The Autistic Alice, a book of poetry for children, three non-fiction books and one novel. Her latest book is Letters to my Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism. She lives in Cambridge, UK, where she teaches Creative Writing at Cambridge University's Insititute of Continuing Education.
Conor O’Callaghan is from Ireland and lives in England. He has published five collections of poems, the most recent being The Sun King (2013) and Live Streaming (2017). He has also published two novels, including We Are Not in the World (2021).
Educated at Ibadan and Syracuse, Tanure Ojaide has published twenty-one collections of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, memoirs, and scholarly work. His awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region, the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry, and the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award. In 2016 he won both the African Literature Association's Folon-Nichols Award for Excellence in Writing and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for the Humanities. In 2018 he co-won the Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Ojaide is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at UNC Charlotte.
Michael Prior's most recent book of poems, Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House, 2020), won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the BC and Yukon Book Prize for poetry. He is recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Jerome Foundation, and Hawthornden Literary Retreat. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Narrative Magazine, PN Review, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series among other publications. He is an assistant professor of English and an ACM Mellon Faculty Fellow at Macalester College.
Medrie Purdham, whose Little Housewolf was published by Véhicule Press (Signal Editions) in 2021, holds a Ph.D. from McGill University and teaches at the University of Regina, Treaty 4. Her work has been published in journals across Canada and anthologized several times in Tightrope Press’s Best Canadian Poetry. She held the City of Regina Writing Award in 2015.
Mark Tredinnick BA (Hons), LLB (Hons), MBA, PhD — is a celebrated poet, essayist, and teacher. His many works of poetry and prose include A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Red Writing Book. For twenty-five years, he has taught poetry and expressive writing at the University of Sydney, where he was poet in residence in 2018. His many honours include two of the world’s foremost poetry prizes, the Montreal and the Cardiff.
Rhian Williams is a writer and poetry specialist based in Glasgow, Scotland (rhianwilliamswriting.com). Her academic articles and journalism, and her book, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry (2019), are valued by students and interested readers across the UK, North America and beyond. She recently co-edited an anthology of ‘new nature poetry’ with Maria Sledmere: the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene and sits on the judging panel for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year prize. Rhian writes, reads, and reviews poetry for several magazines, eagerly allowing poetics to shape her thinking and practice.
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Judging Process
The Shortlist
After the final entry deadline, entries are randomly allocated to jury members. The entries are allocated anonymously – i.e., the jurors do not see the author’s name or any other information about the author. Each entry is assessed by one juror only in order to preserve editorial independence. Each juror selects a handful of poems to advance to the next stage. Together, the jurors’ selections constitute the final list of approximately sixty poems. All poems on the final list are published in the Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology.
The Winner
The prize judge reads the final list of poems and selects the winner of the prize. As with the anthology selection process, the prize judge does not see the names of the authors or any other information about them.
How do I enter the competition?
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