2022 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry Winners

We’re excited to announce the winners of this year’s Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry! Winners and honourable mentions were chosen by our judge, Liz Howard. Read Liz’s comments on her selections below.

Winners

First place: "as medicine" by Serena Lukas Bhandar

Serena Lukas Bhandar is a writer, educator, and witch of Punjabi Sikh and Welsh ancestry, as well as an MA student in English at the University of Calgary. Serena's first chapbook of poetry, this dying body, was published in July 2022 with Rahila's Ghost Press.

“as medicine” treats us to a blissful list that pivots around the citational or perhaps flirts with an index. Its salve is sonic. Its consonant refrain is tender yet insistent, “cardamom” “calms”. Its quotations and parentheses embrace. Its erotic turn delights. This is poem as nourishment. — Liz Howard

Second place: “WE GO NIGHTSWIMMING” by Elisávet Makridis

Elisávet Makridis (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated poet raised between Queens, New York and Greece. She is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College where she received the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize and Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry. Winner of Ruminate Magazine's 2022 Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax's 2022 Sublingua Prize for Poetry, her work has been published in Grist, Frontier Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and Crab Creek Review, amongst others. She recently received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she currently teaches Intro to Creative Writing and a First Year Writing Seminar, "Home, Unbound," in the Department of Literatures in English.

“WE GO NIGHTSWIMMING” invites us into a benthic reverie where marrow splits, “an oar is a spine…brazenly hole-tinseled” and a “throat’s root” is “luminous as lamb fiber.” Each line is a cognitively generative tendril enwrapping the body. I admire its dark intrigue and general weirdness. — Liz Howard

Honourable Mentions

"Pilgrimage" by Rami Schandall

Rami Schandall is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. She lived on the east and west coasts of the US and Canada before arriving in Toronto, and her work is influenced by her coastal roots. Rami's first published poem, “Timepiece,” was the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2019 Open Season Award. Her prose work, “Fernando,” was shortlisted for the same prize in the creative non-fiction category in 2020. Additional poems were published in Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and Crosswinds Poetry Journal, in 2020. Judge Shane Book had this to say about Rami Schandall's winning poem: “To read ‘Timepiece’ is to experience both the tumbling feeling of Time’s non-linearity and the relentlessness of Time’s passage. This is a work of elegant images, linguistic feints, tonal filigree, and scraps of narration—all stitched together with a serious precision.”

"vessel punish honey" by nina jane drystek

nina jane drystek writes poetry, prose & performance exploring the curiosities of language. she is the co-founder & co-curator of Riverbed Reading Series with Ellen Chang-Richardson, often hosts events for the Ottawa International Writers Festival, & sits on the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine. in her day-to-day, nina jane works as a manager of digital communications with Spruce Creative.

You’ll be able to read the winning poems in Canthius 12, published in late 2023. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted their work, and we hope you’ll submit again next fall!

We’re so grateful to Liz Howard for her generosity in reading and judging. All poems were sent to Liz anonymously.