News

2025 Long Poem Prize Winners:
Hamish Ballantyne and Monica Kim

Congratulations to Hamish Ballantyne and Monica Kim for winning our 2025 Long Poem Prize. They'll each receive CAD $1250, and their poems will be published in our summer 2025 issue #231. Thanks again to contest judges Klara du Plessis and Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi.

Here's what the judges had to say about Hamish Ballantyne's poem: "A poem that considers labour within Turtle Island's geopolitics, 'Boomtimes' is filled with surprises. The poet dares to situate their poetics within the interconnected web of global Capitalism and how its tyranny ties the pleasures of the elite to the suffering of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. 'Boomtimes' is therefore a deeply anticapitalist project in undoing the violent and tapestrious history of Colonialism. What stands out in the long poem, however, is the ease with which the poem waves into the personal, slowly and seamlessly floating out and into the communal. 'Boomtimes' is a poem deeply grounded in the actual, yet it manages to maintain a startling level of immediacy. "

Here's what the judges had to say about Monica Kim's poems: "'(Incomplete) List of Korean Queer History' is a formally daring trilogy that tracks queer histories as interwoven with personal narratives and labour politics in Korea. Iteratively constructed through statement and presumed fact, this work sustains and syncopates itself through lyrical excision, working in the gaps and silences—in terms of both form and content—in order to productively question and reconstruct memory. 'leaving is never linear,' the poet writes as they track a temporal journey of discovery and belonging that constantly overwrites and unwrites itself, simultaneously inscribing words that are timeless, contemporary, and resolute. This poem grounds a strong voice in the landscape of long form writing."

Hamish BallantyneHamish Ballantyne is a writer and translator living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab (Knife/Fork/Book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Auric Press, 2022), and one full-length collection, Tomorrow is a Holiday (New Star).

 

Monica Kim Monica Kim (she/her) is a queer Korean diaspora writer living on Canarsie & Munsee Lenape land (Brooklyn, New York). She is a first reader at Augur Magazine and has been part of Tin House Summer Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Periplus Collective, and The Watering Hole. Her writing has appeared in Sho Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast Journal, Honey Literary, and other publications.

 




Look for interviews with Hamish Ballantyne and Monica Kim in our July Malahat lite.

 

We would also like to congratulate the Long Poem Prize shortlisters:

Jeremy Audet, "Whale Fall"
Dominique Bernier-Cormier, "Any Less Alive"
Morteza Dehghani, "Autumn Translation Pastoral"
Matthew Gwathmey, "Posthuman Slow Songs"
Sean Howard, "Listenings (from Etal Adnan's 'To Be in a Time of War')"
Ayaz Muratoglu, "The Cloud and the Lilac"
Natalie Rice, "Eel Weir"