Long Poem Prize

The winners of The Malahat Review‘s Long Poem Prize are Claire Caldwell for “Osteogenesis” and Kim Trainor for “Nothing is Lost.” The final judges Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dave Margoshes, and Lorri Neilsen Glenn chose these pieces among 193 entries. Finalists include Michael Prior for “Marie (I-XII),” Genevieve Lehr for “the latter half of the third quarter of the waning moon,” Kim Trainor for “When they come to that country swept with light,” Eric Folsom for “The Senryu of Solomon,” and Chad Campbell for “February Towers.

About Caldwell’s “Osteogenesis,” the judges said, it ” is a different beast altogether. This narrative poem takes place in a university town and weaves together three stories: that of two young lovers; their friend M (a medical student) and her cadaver; and the decomposition of a great blue whale. These stories, as told by a young woman to her lover, unfold like a mystery that we can never quite solve.”

And about Trainor’s “Nothing is Lost,” they said, “explores the aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide in 1995 in which thousands of Bosnian Muslims were massacred. Such profound cultural and personal loss is almost beyond language. Taking as inspiration the International Committee of the Red Cross Book of Belongings, a publication of photographs and personal effects, the poet creates an alphabet of loss, weaving images of a glove, a marble, notebook, buttons – exquisitely particular personal items – with insights into the ways artifacts themselves become saturated with human sentience.”

Click here to read more about the pieces, the judges, and the authors.