Congratulations to the 2019 Winners of the Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize!

The Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth was established to foster a lifelong relationship between Canadian youth and the literary arts, specifically poetry. The prize is supported through a generous donation from the Stursberg family and other donors in honour of Jessamy Stursberg. The prize accepts submissions from young poets all across Canada, with three prizes awarded in both the Junior (grades 7 to 9) and Senior (grades 10 to 12) categories: 

Winner: $400
Second Place: $350
Third Place: $300 

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Senior winners

Jury: Barbara Black, Laura McRae and Naomi Beth Wakan

First place, senior: “Reflections in Kermanshah” by Nazanin Soghrati

the sky yawns us into existence
spits the lonely image of our crumbling
bodies onto the barren desserts of Kermanshah.
my mother and I are huddling forward towards
some unnameable future hand in hand, awaiting
our past to come and grapple us by the throat
uncertainty lurking underneath the thick of our skin.
we are waiting to shed our history like autumn leaves
but there’s a rawness that brews within, that spills over
the samovar gurgling tea that gushes from the rooftops
of our childhood, the shore lines we used to call home.
there are memories blooming hungry across our flesh —
a past, a revolution threatening to shatter open our ribs,
sew our skin to the sea, press a new history over our wounds.

it’s so easy to slick the mind into forgetting.
but the heart — it shakes and whimpers,
growling and hungry. in the heart, everything is hungry.
meaning the self seeks to consume, meaning
the body splits itself in two in an act of crime, meaning
this — this is a body eat body eat history type of world.

the sky bubbles red and the prayers calcify over my mother’s lips.
hadiths spilling from her throat: all the wrong chords for a hymn.
she is singing in blood and harmonizing an octave off.
we are two bodies cocooned by the middle-eastern sun
stripped to the bone by a past and an unforeseeable future,
hand in hand, waiting.

Judges’ Comments: “Reflections in Kermanshah” delights with evocative, personal, and detailed images that allow us to see a landscape that may be wholly unfamiliar. The link between landscape and the experience of the family adrift is masterful, capturing uncertainty and peril and a world that can no longer be seen as nurturing or even benign. The syntax and use of unusual line breaks draw the reader through this painful experience, suggesting mother and child’s urgency and desperation as they undertake a journey that separates them from their home and drags them through Middle Eastern deserts to an unknown destination. This poem speaks to the movement of masses of displaced people over the last fifty years, the loss of home and forced stays in camps with the uncertainty of ever leaving them. “Huddling forward,” “rooftops of our childhood,” “the prayers calcify,” so many fresh phrases make this poem so compelling. If this poem records a real experience, it is heartbreaking. If it’s a fiction, then the poet’s imagination and ability to empathize is amazing.

Second place, senior: “The day after you left” by Angelina Shandro

the day after you left was like
curly haired boys shouting from the back of a pickup truck,
souvlaki smouldering and hissing at the waterfront,
waves exposing their white flesh, moments before striking concrete.

like a girl’s hesitation before she boards the rickety bus to Athens,
like vagrant dogs sniffing at fresh graffiti each morning,
gold-rimmed glasses of ouzo slid carelessly over a wooden counter,
ripples of bouzouki music seeping into humid air.

like trading your last drachmas for olives under an amber sun
the scent of freshly-ground oregano woven between curls of cigarette smoke,
like pairs of bronze feet dangling from the edge of the sea wall,
milky sailboats balancing on wine-dark waves.

like visitors stepping onto quivering docks,
bewildered, failing to remember Greek phrases they believed they knew.

Judges’ Comments: A cumulative rendering of the poet’s feelings after an absent “you” has departed, this poem employs a series of beautifully crafted, vivid similes (“like waves exposing their white flesh”) which not only creates a strong picture of a parting and the longing it involves, but also gives us a warm, rich picture of a Greek seaside town. The images seem to conjure different emotional states, leaving the reader multiple ways to interpret the narrator’s state of mind: sad, angry (“souvlaki smouldering and hissing”), exultant (“curly haired boys shouting”), expectant about a new future (“trading your last drachmas for olives”), or, perhaps, freshly alive to his or her surroundings. Using the words “quivering” and “bewildered” in the last two lines cleverly introduces the feeling of insecurity at the separation and the idea that leaving may cause not only loss of a relationship, but also a diminishing of knowledge of one’s culture.

Third place, senior: “Calabash” by Max Zhang

When we were small we would walk in between the cold, dying firs,
past the fissures in the sides of the grain silo without saying a single word.
The slide came into view first and we tested our speed, flannel jackets
dropping onto the frosted grass as we tore up the dirt in our contest.
But soon, when we had had enough of the slide and our butts too cold to
be pressed against the metal for any longer, we wobbled our way
to the garden where the calabash hung from their vines and
gyrated with the wind. We would feast on their flesh, hum loudly in our
false delight as if the fruit was a lozenge to our parched esophaguses.

You told me that, in Calabasas, they don’t have calabashes. The sun shines
every day and palm trees are your only clouds. Slides are too hot to slide down,
you pipped brightly, and cracks in public infrastructure are filled up
within a week. It is brighter, greener, so you do not want to come back.
There is no life here.

Last week, I walked to the garden and found that my feet know my weight too well.
My legs did not threaten to buckle. The calabash coated my tongue with umami.

Judges’ Comments: This wonderful poem written in a prose style but with a poetic sensibility, captures a distinct moment in childhood, a landscape with “dying firs” and “fissures” in a silo, and then draws a contrast between the actors, the elements of the poem’s “we” in that landscape of their youth. At first it seems elegiac, but in the second stanza the narrator addresses a “you” in a “brighter, greener,” less imperfect locale (Calabasa) where “cracks… are filled up”—a “you” who told the narrator s/he was not coming back. In the third stanza the narrator, now older (“my feet know my weight too well”), seems to have chosen the imperfect place and still relishes the taste of its fruit (calabash). The poem illustrates that where we live has to feed our soul. The images and language support the realization of the universality of childhood and how it stands side-by-side with intense difference in experience.

Honorable Mentions

“7 am, morning dark” by Stephanie Ya Wen Chang, grade 11

My mother wakes up before anyone else
in the flat. She tells me it precedes her sometimes,

how her husband doesn’t live here anymore.

She’s sick with stomach pain again, chamomile mouth
unzipping saliva from gums. So my father takes my sister

and I out for home-style Korean. We laugh and
he bellows weightless, voice a scalloped silver

as yellow-bellied children find hideaway outside.
We don’t notice. We eat only hot things,

rice cakes and marbling red soup, stuff
without sharp edges. We avoid hard conversations,

the way my father likes it. My sister stops red-light
before we leave, says Ma is hungry, at home.

My father doesn’t seem to know
what we are talking about: What home? Whose

house but mine? He unfurls like an old sail,
calls her lazy, a flickering hole

in someone else’s history.

On the drive home, we say nothing. It’s
already dark again. On this horizon, it gets dark

too quickly too often. At home, my mother
languages a clot of lullabies into our throats,

her bright bathrobe clammy and formless.
And that night, my sister wonders how stitching

the seams of an ocean for someone
is counter-romantic, paradox lost in translation

or limbs, I add. About family: we know
our father will go for late-night sushi by himself

this Friday evening. Our mother will stir 7am
tomorrow, no matter what. They’re the same dark,

whispering I’m home I’m home I’m home I’m home

Judges’ Comments: A subtle picture of a broken home—the children moving from being with one parent to being with the other and trying to deal with the blackness with whatever resources they can drum up. This repeated personal moment, both personal and universal, opens for the reader a new kind of experience, entirely different from their own and yet utterly familiar. The specificity of the experience doesn’t isolate the reader from the writer; the reader can recognize moments of alienation and uncertainty in her own life, different in detail but universal in tenor and effect. The impossibility of “stitching the seams of an ocean,” an original line that says it all. The poet shows so clearly how the ‘home’ the daughters once knew no longer exists.

“Coalesce” by Stephanie Ya Wen Chang, grade 11

I’m floating on a white-lipped whale, her backside
scabbed by barnacle & sea-glass. There was a metaphor

in the water, somewhere. I held it just this morning.
It was after I filled new skin, chose a body

from bodies of algae. Is it possible, I asked, to pulse
like an anglerfish? Scales overturned in sunlight,

rippling at breakneck pace? It’s about me,
always trembling; chlorinated & splotchy, face

pale & red-lit. The searchlights flooded every
bone until I forgot why they were here. Who

the rescue boats sang for. I rose in my sleep,
broke shallow breath. The whales cooed &

cawed. My body not mine at all. Instead,
an item of the sea. What I saw: mouth foaming

at the corners, head trying to echo-locate home.
Look, I just wanted calm. Hoist canvas & sail like

anybody else. It’s not about surviving anymore
& I said it again: Is it possible—I mean, to love

what I will never be? & my whale laughed,
lips parting like a shark eye shell. & I looked

at her, at everything. & love loved us.

The sea was heavy with rainwater by the time
I woke up again. I felt a pulse. My own.

Judges’ Comments: A unique poetic voice anchors this poem written in couplets, which takes the reader through a dream-like journey, a transformative interspecies exploration between marine and human life which begins with, “I’m floating on a white-lipped whale…” and carries out a visual, tactile, and sonic exploration of self, perhaps questioning its own worth (“It’s about me, always trembling”). The inserted voice of the narrator highlights the mythic quality of this encounter with whale and seascape, philosophic questions given form and focus as the ruminations of the imagining mind. A delightful romp which features vivid images that appeal to every sense, the poem shows a finely tuned sensibility to both the natural and psychological realm and calls for repeated readings to tease out its nuances.

“The Physical Lover” by Rashid Al-Abri, grade 12

You bring out the Newton in me,
the cosine curves that rule my pendulum-like motion,
the 𝜋 and 𝑔 constants in me.

You bring out the quantum admirer in me,
the particle at the two places,
the collapsing energy levels,
the 𝑛=2 in me.

You bring out the thermodynamic companion in me,
the heat transfer, the 𝑄=𝑚𝑐∆𝑇,
the Gay-Lussac law in me.

You bring out the collision physicist in me,
the ∆𝑝 >0, the increased momentum in me.

You bring out the fluid sweetheart in me,
the Lubrication theory, the buoyancy forces in me.

You bring out the projectile lover in me,
the 𝑥 and 𝑦 component, the gravity in me,
the Euclidean vector in me.

You bring out the physical Romeo in me,
let’s multiply our vectors, the cross product,
let me feel your sine curve and I’ll let you touch
all the tangents in me.

Judges’ Comments: “You bring out the Newton in me.” A sure and cheeky tone launches you into this well-structured poem, showing masterful control of repetition and its clever theme: expressing the poet’s attraction to the desired one by using mathematical and physics formulae. Anything that skillfully joins science with the arts gets points! The poem’s jazzy, spooling rhythms (“You bring out the quantum admirer in me”) drive each line like an incantation, conjuring up images of a beat poet in a dim bar leaning into a mic, reading in between licks from a saxophone. A delight! Sharp, fresh and very funny. A laugh out loud reading experience, often a rarity when reading poetry.

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Junior Winners

Jury: Bianca Lakoseljac, Lois Lorimer and Diana Manole

First place, junior: “All Purple” by Jonathan Chu

Judges’ Comments: The author describes the landscape during the transition from summer to winter, using very original images and layout. The vocabulary is rich and the metaphors personify various natural elements, assigning them self-reflective thoughts and everyday human gestures. The ending is shocking through the combination of life and death, spirituality and irony: “Winter arrives besuited and chic, / gown ordained / with skeleton squirrels.”

Second place, junior: “I Am” by Sophie Choong

i am

tired

of all the

madness and rage and fighting

from the one day when i chose to

wear my sister’s skirt to a New Year’s party

and my mother said i was

no child of hers.

i am

sick

of the looks i get

when i walk into the

public bathroom of the people i belong to

aching because no matter where i

choose to go i will

never fit there.

i am

exhausted

of sleeping on park benches

kneeling in streets and knowing that

my father is the reason my mother started to hate

bent people.

i am

done

with my sister

seeing me at the mall when she goes shopping

pretending she doesn’t notice me

and walking away because

she is scared of what

my mother will think

my mother will say

my mother will do.

i am

dead

inside from

the unforgiving looks from strangers

refusing to care about anything “unnatural”

and my friends turning their backs

if i even dare to

wear my favourite dress out in public.

i am

a girl

no matter what

my friends think

my mother hates

my sister ignores and

my father was too.

i am a girl.

Judges’ comments: With a simple vocabulary, the author effectively conveys the alienation of a young transgender person who reclaims the right to be different despite prejudices and her family’s rejection. With impressive simplicity, the ending suggests that her father experienced a similar kind of alienation. The center alignment of the poem adds an emotionally-charged and fluid image, whose meaning depends on each of the readers.

Third place, junior: “The Sky Between Two Roofs” by Jamie Wang

There were two roofs.
One was black, one was grey.
In between them was a sky.

Sometimes, the sky seemed so far away.
Sometimes it was near.

On hot summer days,
The clouds would drift aimlessly between the two roofs,
While a breeze swirled around white petals
that settled in the embrace of the shadowed path.

On cold winter nights,
The stars would speckle the space between the two roofs,
While snowflakes danced in the frozen air,
And fell onto the translucent ground.

On warm spring days,
The sky was like a brush of paint between the two roofs.
A dim lamp post would stretch upwards,
While the breeze tickled overhanging ferns.

On cool autumn evenings,
The sky would completely disappear.
There would be nothing between the two roofs,
Except for the chilly wind.

On those days spent in that little path,
When I looked up…
I always saw the sky between the two roofs.

Judges’ comments: The atmosphere created by this poem evokes a sense of peacefulness laddered with the constraint of an urban or suburban view. The author’s use of repetition and choice of images engage the senses as a response to a sky that “was like a brush of paint between two roofs,” as well as a window into appreciating the natural world through the seasons.

Honourable Mentions:

1. Jia by Jonathan Chu, grade 8
2. If I Could by Madhavan Thevar, grade 9
3. Space by Jewel Cao, grade 9