2025 Winner & Shortlist

Winner and Finalists for 2025 Contest

WINNER:
Jacqueline Bell – Summoning

Jacqueline Bell’s, Summoning, maintains that “you reach the age when everything turns / to elegy.”  This chapbook is elegiac, yes, familial, inconsolable: “Grief . . . always too late, missing the train.” As in, failed.  Starlight has claimed her mother. The poetry is touching, tender.  In the face of such regret, we can’t look away. We are reminded that humanity is as “lonely as foghorns.”  The poetry is so compelling, we cannot take exception. Who cannot know this; who cannot agree?  The ocean, the sand, the driftwood, the mint-green anemones, all come and go: “The opposite of eggs are headstones.”  So much clarity, so much strength, so much, in life, is available, and yet so much is absent; as Bell maintains, “We dwell in the wake of memory.”  So much in this chapbook lands in a true and meaningful place.

Jacqueline Bell’s burning for it (Rowan Books, 1998) was shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Henry Kreisel award for best first book. Her poetry has been published in literary journals including The Fiddlehead, Grain, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Event. Her work has also appeared in thirteen anthologies. The Imperfect received Honourable Mention in Raven’s Chapbook Contest 2024. Ubi Sunt, a chapbook, was published in 2025 by Alfred Gustav press.

Second Place:
Diane Massam – Ground Cover

Ground Cover, Diane Massam’s exploration of the tension between quietude and complication, addresses the anxiety produced by this tension, life’s attempt at balance, and the necessary uncertainty therein.  She proposes, in seamless poetics, that “time does not fly like an arrow, but a butterfly, erratic.”  Using a range of, primarily, nature imagery, she combines moments of life’s trajectories, praising especially whatever is able to wait.  Moss waits, erratic stones wait, as do recipes in a box.  They all know how to wait: “Even demons know how to wait.”  Contemplating time in this linear/non-linear, uncertain world, the chapbook is both elegant and thoughtful, offering glimpses of her own waiting, her own unending longing.

Diane Massam writes about anxiety and the entanglement of nature and mind. With recent/upcoming publications in The New Quarterly, Queens Quarterly, Grain, and Prairie Fire, she won the Federation of BC Writers poetry contest (2021) and the Arc Award of Awesomeness (September 2024). She is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto, where she has also completed a certificate in creative writing. With roots in BC, Ontario, and Québec, she now lives in her hometown, Victoria. (IG: @massampoetry)

Third Place:
Murray Mann – In the Land of Cheslatta

Early in this thought-provoking suite of poems, Murray Mann reminds us that “The children don’t know about this story”: of how, early in 1950s, Alcan diverted the Cheslatta River in the BC interior so it would flow directly to the Pacific Ocean rather than more circuitously through the Fraser River system in order to generate electricity for its aluminium plant in Kitamat. Part elegy, part protest, In the Land of Cheslatta, in like manner but to different ends, diverts poetry’s lyrical impulse from its usual benign-eloquent course to bring the land and lakes that this diversion flooded and the Indigenous peoples it betrayed heartbreakingly back into the light. The passionate natural energy of these poems supplants the bureaucratic language used to streamline the near erasure of this river and drains it of its questionable authority, all the while recognizing that the damage has been done. “[B]ut” there it is / all this water,” laments Mann, “the sheer weight of it / and how it got here / still hurts.”

Murray Mann (he/him) grew up in the traditional territories of Nadleh Whut’en in the central interior of BC and now lives on Cowichan territory. He works at the Sobering Centre in Warmland house shelter. Murray has published poems in Island Writer, Sweetwater (ed. Blomer), The Sky is Falling (ed. Martindale), Worth More Standing (ed. Lowther) and Event 2022. His poem “How I Kept My Pace With the Mountains” was selected as honorable mention for Vallum Magazine’s poetry contest 2023.

Marlene Grand Maître
Carrying Lake Superior

“I take the lake with me everywhere,” Marlene Grand Maître states plainly at the beginning of Carrying Lake Superior—and carry this great lake she does, and the childhood she lived beside it, as far as Vancouver Island, where she lives today. In this carefully constructed suite of poems that combines the glosa, ghazal, pantoum, pastiche, and ekphrasis with the pleasures of free verse, Grand Maître illustrates how our first landscapes shape us and inform how we experience and celebrate those later landscapes we subsequently and not always reluctantly call home.

Marlene Grand Maître has had two chapbooks published: Cancer’s Rogue Season (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) and Wild Kin (Raven Chapbooks, 2023). Her poems have also appeared in literary journals, including Arc, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire and Grain. Her work can be found in ten anthologies, most recently in Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press, 2022). She has won the Freefall and FBCW poetry prizes, and had a poem chosen by the LCP for Poem In Your Pocket for National Poetry Month, 2022.

Mary Ann Moore
The Risks We Take for Love

This is a collection of risks. It begins with Aunt Cecil’s correction: “Leaves aren’t just green,” and the poet’s response: “So I add brown and yellow, a bit of red.”  What can be true?  In The Risks We Take for Love, Mary Ann Moore makes a fine and compelling poetic case, citing challenges, for making attempts at authenticity against all odds.

Mary Ann Moore (she/her) is a poet, writer and writing mentor living on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo, B.C.. Mary Ann’s poetry and essays have been published in many literary journals and anthologies and she has published two writing guides: Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey (IAJW.org) and Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice (Flying Mermaids Studio). Among her books of poetry are Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press), Mending (house of appleton) and forthcoming: Modern Words for Beauty (house of appleton).
www.maryannmoore.ca