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Far Horizons Award for Poetry

2024 Winner - Craig Francis Power

The Malahat Review is pleased to announce the winner of this year's Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Craig Francis Power has won $1,250 for his poem, "Walking My Three-Year-Old to Nanny's Place, Easter Sunday 2017," set for publication in our 2024 fall issue #228.

Craig Francis Power

Here's what this year's judge, Patrick Grace, had to say:

First off, what an honour to be chosen as the judge for the 2024 Far Horizons Award for Poetry. The 10 shortlisted poems demonstrated beauty and skill in both form and content. I couldn’t help but notice some common themes between them, themes around family, parenting (whether animal or human), and learning from our elders.

Of the 10 poems, “Walking My Three-Year-Old to Nanny’s Place, Easter Sunday 2017” stood out the most. Form and content weave together effortlessly, a symbiosis of parent and child in tune with the semi-rhyming couplets that propel the poem forward through streets the speaker despises, and ultimately wishes to forget. The piece is masterful, every line purposefully colliding into the next, as the family rushes through town to arrive at nanny’s place. Even in rebirth, “what’s supposed to be spring,” the town is still a shithole, and this disgust on the part of the speaker had me grinning for much of the poem.

The careful crafting of the first-half, racing forward with no full-stops—as do parent and child—is excellent, as is the second half: like the “dank ooze” that introduces the poem, I found myself equally slowed in the stop/start, push/pull of midline punctuation. And those long, beautiful lines! Stuck in steep memory and forced to take in the cluster of Gothic spaces (“the courthouse, the penitentiary, / the brewery, the hospital, the cathedral…”), I imagined an old beater car, chugging forward, oppressed by this rundown town and its sharp, cruel spires. What a pleasant surprise to read and select such a stunning piece!

Craig Francis Power (he/him) is a visual artist and the award-winning author of three novels. Total Party Kill, his first collection of poetry forthcoming from Breakwater Books in Fall 2024, is an exploration of addiction and sobriety through the vernacular, imagery, and lore of Dungeons & Dragons, the Fantasy-themed table-top role-playing game. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk) with his partner, daughter, dog, and cat.

An interview with Craig Francis Power on his winning poem will appear in a fall issue of our Malahat lite e-newsletter.

Congratulations to this year's Far Horizons contest finalists:Jennifer Gossoo, Kristen Mears, Rachael Riley, Tazi Rodrigues, daryl sneath, Catherine St. Denis, Owen Torrey, and Paula Turcotte.

Thank you to all contest entrants, judge Patrick Grace, and our kind and hard-working volunteers.

The Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award for Poetry runs every even-numbered year, alternating with the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction.