The Malahat Review congratulates Claire Caldwell of Toronto, ON and Kim Trainor of Vancouver, BC whose poems, "Osteogenesis" and “Nothing is Lost” have won our 2013 Long Poem Prize.
A different beast altogether: Vanessa Herman in Conversation with Claire Caldwell
VH: First off, congratulations on winning The Malahat Review’s 2013 Long Poem prize! “Osteogenesis” takes the reader through layers of skin down to the bones. Tell us, what “sparked” this poem?
CC: Thanks very much! I'm so honoured to win this prize. The first spark for the poem was a segment I heard on WNYC's Radiolab, about the "afterlife" of a whale. The idea of a singular animal--especially such a big one--becoming this vibrant, shifting ecosystem was compelling to me. As soon as I began writing about the whale, some other narratives and images I'd been working with were sucked into its orbit. Kind of like all the sea creatures, I guess!
Read this interview in full on our website.
Like a coat or a bicycle or a lens: Stefan Krecsy in Conversation with Kim Trainor
SK: You open your long poem, “Nothing is Lost,” with an extensive excerpt from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World and throughout your work you freely integrate and adapt this passage. While you clearly wanted the reader to have this text in mind throughout “Nothing is Lost,” why did you want to respond to this passage in particular and did you set out writing with the passage in mind, or did you incorporate it later?
KT: I wrote an earlier version of the poem a year or so ago but it was too dark. When I came back to it again this past fall, what made it work for me the second time was having reread Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain, which has been an important book to me over the years for thinking about artefacts and about language itself as artefact, and their role in making the world, as a counter to its unmaking, its destruction.
Read this interview in full on our website.
