TORONTO BARTENDER WINS $20,000 MONTREAL POETRY PRIZE
MONTREAL, September 20, 2015 - The Montreal International Poetry Prize, offering
$20,000 for one poem of no longer than 40 lines, is proud to announce this year's winner.
Eva H.D. is an emerging poet whose first book, Rotten Perfect Mouth, was just published by
Mansfield Press this past spring. Eva lives in Toronto and pulls pints at a local dive on
Queen Street West. Her poem, "38 Michigans," was selected from over 2,000 entries from
66 countries in what is known as a blind competition (where those selecting the poems do
not see author names). When asked how she intends to spend her newly won money, Eva
replied it would give her more time to write and travel.
Prize Judge, Professor Eavan Boland, selected "38 Michigans" from among the 50 poems
chosen for the anthology. Here’s an excerpt of what she had to say about the winning poem:
"This poem . . . is a quirky, intense elegy. . . . We never get to feel here that the person
missed or lost is also being objectified into silence or passivity . . . . Instead the subject of
the poem is defined, right from the start, in original, offbeat, surprising ways so that we stay
connected to them and to the emotional colour of the poem. They are “thirty-eight
Michigans away.” Or they are “polishing off a sandwich made of rare, impossible air.”" You
can read the poem and listen to Eva read it on the Montreal International Poetry Prize
website: montrealprize.com.
Past winners were Mark Tredinnick from Australia in 2011 and in 2013, Mia Anderson from
Quebec. Eva's win puts Canada in the lead. The Montreal Prize invited 10 poets from
Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, Scotland, South Africa, Trinidad, the UK, and the USA to
select poems for the 2015 Global Poetry Anthology from among this year's submissions to
the Montreal International Poetry Prize. The 2,000 entries were divided evenly among them,
giving each just over 200 entries from which they selected 7 poems apiece for the 2015
Longlist, and of those 7, only 5 for the Global Poetry Anthology.
The Montreal International Poetry Prize is a biennial competition that will be launching
again January 15, 2017. The Montreal International Poetry Prize is a crowdfunded not-forprofit open to entries in any style and on any topic, so long as the poem is the original,
previously unpublished work of the person entering it in the competition, and so long as it is
no longer than 40 lines. Enter online at montrealprize.com.
Winner of the 2015 Montreal International Poetry Prize
Eva H.D.
Eva bartends on Queen West in Toronto and just
this spring published a book of poetry with
Mansfield Press called Rotten Perfect Mouth.
Sometimes she gets to run off and cook on
tallships or canoe in Temagami. She has also
worked as a translator for Legal Aid, a nanny, a
woefully subpar drywaller, a bicycle messenger
and a cardboard-folder on an assembly line. She
sometimes tells people that Keith Richards is her
boyfriend, and they believe her, because they have never heard of the Rolling
Stones. Some people have called her a tough read. Other people have called
her a tarantula. In her spare time she transcribes the fictional conversations of
pigeons and crabs and makes unsolicited translations of popular song lyrics.
She will send haikus to your home by postcard. She often gets asked for
directions, and would like to buy you a beer.
Comments from Prize Judge Eavan Boland
This poem—“38 Michigans”—is a quirky, intense
elegy. It works so well, I think, because it makes
fresh again an old and powerful basis of lament:
one in which all the contours of ordinary reference
and experience are forced into a new shape. Where
any logic of place or geography becomes the
willing servant of memory and longing.
We never get to feel here that the person
missed or lost is also being objectified into silence
or passivity—a big risk in the contemporary elegy.
Instead the subject of the poem is defined, right
from the start, in original, offbeat, surprising ways so that we stay connected to
them and to the emotional colour of the poem. They are “thirty-eight Michigans
away.” Or they are “polishing off a sandwich made of rare, impossible air.”
There is a fine line being managed here between the sugar of whimsical
language and the shadow of an actual loss. But the management is always adroit
and convincing. The poem benefits from the tension. The whimsy itself
suggests that grief has found a voice and is making its own reality with a deviltake-the-hindmost defiance.
The Winning Poem
38 Michigans
You are thirty-eight Michigans away from me,
thirty-eight wolverine states into your cups
in the sky, because being dead is like being
profoundly tanked, profound as an empty silo,
with your thoughts and your arms and your
credit cards ignoring you, just eyes, eyes, and behind
those eyes nothing, or the sky, or the smell of manure,
or thirty-eight Michigans of black, bloated ice.
One Michigan is bigger by far than a football field,
and two or ten is one of those I'm a man who needs
no woman type of motorcycle trips and fifteen is all the
old routes of tea or silk or spice or Trans-Siberian
misery rolled; but thirty-eight is the size of the space where Oh,
I need to call you, though laying hands upon
the phone I am repelled by a forcefield of practicality,
grasping at the incongruities of the calendar year and my
desire and your non-existence. Thirty-eight Michigans away
you are no doubt somewhere or other, balking at being,
polishing off a sandwich made of rare, impossible air.
You are as likely as the apocalypse. I can almost hear
you on my radio, the cracks in your voice of clay.
I summon up photos of our planet as seen from
invented places like e.g. the moon and it looks
like a Rubik's cube. Peel off the stickers and
solve the black plastic beneath. Solve this blank
sheet of aluminium. Solve this anteater.
Yes, I recommend walking in the rain,
sluicing in the lake, howling at the shadow
of the moon behind the moon. Say Go long
before you throw long. Say Heads. Give the
dead more than their due. Yes, I recommend
cutting and running. Can you hear me, thirty-eight
Michigans down the line? Go long.
EVA H.D.
2015 Global Poetry Anthology
The Global Poetry anthologies are one-of-a-kind
collections of contemporary, previouslyunpublished poems gathered from all corners of
the English speaking world. An international
editorial board ensures the series’ cosmopolitan
palette, and the “blind” selection process
guarantees that choices have been made according
to poetic calibre alone.
The 2015 Global Poetry Anthology was
edited by 10 well established and accomplished
poets from around the globe: Gabeba Baderoon
(South Africa), Kate Clanchy (Scotland), Carolyn
Forché
(USA), Amanda Jernigan (Canada),
Anthony Lawrence (Australia), Niyi Osundare
(Nigeria), Jennifer Rahim (Trinidad), K.
Satchidanandan (India), Michael Schmidt (UK),
Bruce Taylor (Canada).
The 2013 Global Poetry Anthology is
published by Véhicule Press, Signal Editions and
is available for pre-order now:
[email protected].
“the anthology contains more than one “Hell yeah!” poetry moment
– the kind of poem that avid poetry readers can use to argue poetry’s
merits to the unconverted.” – Montreal Review of Books
Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar and the author of the poetry collections, The Dream
in the Next Body and A Hundred Silences, and the monograph Regarding Muslims: from
slavery to post-apartheid.
Kate Clanchy’s three collections Slattern, Samarkand, and Newborn, have recently been
gathered into a Selected Poems, published by Picador. Her poetry has won the Forward, Saltire
and Somerset Maugham Prizes.
Carolyn Forché is editor of two best-selling poetry anthologies, Against Forgetting and
Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (co-edited with Duncan Wu). Her
poetry books include Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History
and Blue Hour.
READ MORE ABOUT OUR 2015 EDITORIAL BOARD @ montrealprize.com