Vallum Chapbook Award 2021 Finalist: Malcolm Sanger | Stone Series

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Finalist, Malcolm Sanger, Stone Series, Vallum Chapbook Award 2021

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Malcolm Sanger is a graduate student in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Originally from Toronto, he has studied anthropology and literature and worked in restaurants and reforestation.

 

 

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Malcolm Sanger is one of the finalists for the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for his chapbook Stone Series.

 

Stones Series is a group of poems set in Yucatán. They come from ethnographic fieldwork on tourism and migration in the region, work on Maya glyphs and sites by anthropologists Dennis Tedlock and Quetzil Casatañeda, and essays and poems by Charles Olson and Roman Jakobson. At its center is a list of words (or found poem) that someone Sanger lived with wrote down to translate. These words animate narratives and questions around materiality and language, sound and image, archaeology and anthropology, espionage and translation, analogy and parallelism.

 

Vallum Chapbook Award 2021 Finalist: Heather White | DES MONSTERAS

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DES MONSTERAS, Finalist, Vallum Chapbook Award 2021

signal bars | wi-fi | time | headphones | battery

<DES MONSTERAS share | send

We came off the mountain and I
was still holding the stick I’d used to
prod at the fire and as a baton to
conduct us, singing; also to point at
our paths and the solstice moon,
which was up in a cupboard the
clouds kept sliding open and shut.
Down by her orange car, Caroline
asked about the man I was now
seeing indoors. Waving the branch,
still conducting something, I tried to
summon how I felt. I liked a lot
about him but wasn’t sure if he
reciprocated: he was not very
demonstrative. I hadn’t used this
word in a while, but having dredged
it up I kept repeating it, hearing how
it tapped on the core of the issue,
feeling how it kicked at the tires.

…. trash | list | photo | edit | new

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Heather White lives in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. Her writing on art and culture has appeared in Canadian Art, the Brooklyn Rail, Real Life, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her current practice experiments with hybrid forms and memoir, and she’s now at work on a collection about leaving.

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Heather White is one of the finalists for the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook DES MONSTERAS.

DES MONSTERAS records the hopes and humiliations of arriving somewhere new. Composed by phone, torquing formal constraints into solace, its fifteen notes trace both an insular retreat and an impulse to connect during the Montreal winter of the pandemic. The chapbook is a poptimist’s account of moving and courtship that speaks to the thrill of beginnings, the threat of histories, the whims of grace, and the work of candour.

Vallum Chapbook Award 2021 Finalist: Emma Rhodes | Queer/Joy

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Chapbook Contest, Finalist, Queer/Joy, Vallum Chapbook Award 2021

Tapas

 

The first time I thought I was queer
was after kissing my best friend in 7th grade.

Or maybe
…………………….. it was when I ate an apple.
……………………………………… The curve of the core and
……………………………………… seed so hidden and
……………………………………… poisonous.

Maybe
…………………….. it was drinking tea
……………………………………… with another friend and playing chess.
……………………………………… The way their lips gripped the glass, the ambiguous
……………………………………… power of the queen. The wetness, maybe

…………………….. the heat of the tea.
……………………………………… That gentle warmth blanketing
……………………………………… my face from the harsh winter air or
……………………………………… fogging my sight. Maybe

…………………….. it was the nachos
……………………………………… when I dated men, the game nights,
……………………………………… the crunch, cuts on the roof of my mouth, trying
……………………………………… not to chew too loudly. Didn’t want

…………………………………………………………………….to be annoying, maybe
…………………………………………………………………….it was the muffins. The freedom
…………………………………………………………………….to throw whatever ingredient in and
…………………………………………………………………….be happy with the taste, still.

……………………………………………………………………………………… Maybe I was queer when
……………………………………………………………………………………… I stopped focusing
……………………………………………………………………………………… on who

……………………………………………………………………………………… what or how I consumed
……………………………………………………………………………………… maybe I was always

……………………………………………………………………………………… hungry

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Emma Rhodes is an award-winning queer writer and alumna of St. Thomas University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in places such as Prism International, Riddle Fence, Qwerty, Plenitude, and elsewhere. In 2021 she was the recipient of the Robert Clayton Casto Poetry Prize. She is currently living on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendatg people, where she will complete a Master of Arts in English Literature at Queen’s University.

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Emma Rhodes is one of the finalists for the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook Queer/Joy.

Queer/Joy attempts to define a queerness inextricably attached to sexual trauma, female and queer friendships, body insecurity and more. While it does not arrive at a definition, the collection follows the author’s journey healing from a history of abuse and coming to accept her queer which is fluid and changing.

 

Vallum Chapbook Award 2021 Finalist: David Hargreaves | We’re All Gonna Die Someday

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David Hargreaves, Finalist, Vallum Chapbook Award 2021, We're All Gonna Die Someday

Postcard from the Ice Storm

— Independence, Oregon. January 2021

Dear N—
Gone to bed happy, one hundred percent
chance of a snow day, they say—

midnight—gun-shot reports
of tree-trunks cracked in two,

ice-glazed oak chandeliers shattering
on the rotunda floor. Utility poles

crushing cars, the arctic insurrection
cuts internet access, freezing assets

and truth conditions. I peer out
from under blankets,

crystal chards crunch
under militia boots marching

past on frozen lawns. Limb-punctured
roofs leak CO2. Winter’s back

is broken. The world is not well.
Anymore daffodil

have no business
in a poem.

We’re all gonna die someday
Yours truly,

.

.

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Living in Oregon, born in Detroit, David Hargreaves’ translation of The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets, poems by Nepal Bhasa poet Durga Lal Shrestha, was published in Kathmandu in 2014. His own poems appear in Comstock Review, Passages North, Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere, including The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing (Knopf). Running Out of Words for Afterwards (Broadstone Books), his first full-length collection, is due out in September 2021.

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David Hargreaves is one of the finalists for the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook We’re All Gonna Die Someday.

Vallum Chapbook Award 2021 Finalist: Pamela Porter | Finding What He Can of his Own Way Home: Elegy of Patrick Lane

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Finalist, poem, Vallum Chapbook Award 2021

What is worn is what has lived

The wild rose was full with winter birds
settled on the risen snow. Chickadee,
nuthatch, junco.

And in another house, your dying
nearly complete. And the air thickening
with snow, but the birds remained.

How the heart closes a door so silently,
nothing disturbs the quiet.

And you stood up and entered a place.
One that had been prepared for you.
And the present fell away to the past.

Winter mornings you’d wake before dawn
and in that darkness, walked to the sea
where, in silence, in unison, the mute swans

took flight, the only sound in that moment
their wings pushing the air down and down
as they rose out of sight.

And after that, you knew anyone
could rise out of sight.

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.

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Pamela Porter’s work has won more than a dozen provincial, national and international awards, including the Governor General’s Award for her young adult novel The Crazy Man, as well as the Pat Lowther, Raymond Souster, and the CBC/Canada Writes shortlists. Among her 14 published books, her most recent is Likely Stories, released in 2019 from Ronsdale Press. Pamela lives near Sidney, BC with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs, and cats.

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Pamela Porter is one of the finalists for the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook Finding What He Can of his Own Way Home: Elegy of Patrick Lane.

The poems in Finding What He Can of his Own Way Home: Elegy of Patrick Lane are redolent with swans and wild rose, tree frogs singing into the night, echo both the poems of Patrick Lane and the poet herself, Pamela Porter, who lives with his spirit, as those who loved him do. The poet has “risen out of sight” but those who loved him feel his presence in their lives still. These poems rise also, with passion and compassion, written with love. And what does a loved one become, after death? the flame in the candle the moth at the window, the outline of a body in a chair in the early morning, an elegy, a set of poems that continue to live in the hearts of all readers.

— Blurb by Barbara Pelman