We are thrilled to reveal the winner of the League’s second annual National Broadsheet Contest: Leah MacLean-Evans! Her winning poem Name Me After a Fish was selected by this year’s judge and the winner of  last year’s inaugural contest, Doyali Islam for its “subtle vulnerabilities and playful humour.”

Name Me After a Fish
by Leah Maclean-Evans

Goldeye or Cichlid

silver and smooth and genderless, make me as an alien, forget

the rules, name me

Corydoras of two halves, name me Coelacanth for surviving

name me Plecostromus name me Trout

name me Catfish

let them imagine my genitals as smooth tough skin, not think to touch them.

Say, let me introduce Pickerel.

Say, have you met my friend Haddock. Say, this is my daughter Herring.

And I will breathe water in and through me, swim flicking in the slip

Name Me After a Fish is a spare poem, but each pass yields more for the reader in terms of philosophical inquiry, emotional affect, and introspection. The poem’s tones and meanings dart and flash, as a fish might: is the speaker saying this or that or both or more? Recite this poem aloud, and you will hear its music and urgency, its subtle vulnerabilities and playful humour. Here is a poem critical for – and, perhaps, of – our times. An iridescent voice. – Doyali Islam

In addition to being crafted into the above artisan broadsheet by Briar Craig, Name Me After a Fish has been published in the 2018 booklet for Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 26!

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ABOUT LEAH MACLEAN-EVANS

Leah MacLean-Evans lives on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people. She’s the 2017 fiction winner of the Blodwyn Memorial Prize. Her writing has appeared in Qwerty, untethered, Ottawater, On Spec Magazine, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan and is the proofreader of Grain Magazine.